Great And Spacious Podcast

Send us Fan MailWith fellow desert people Abby and Sam joining the table, Abish blinds everyone with the Science of the Lambs, a radioactive-green experiment combining Midori, blue curaçao, vodka, and some suspiciously persistent flat Sprite. A skewer of rainbow gummy frogs provides the educational garnish because dissecting amphibians is science, and because gummy fetal pig hearts remain tragically unavailable. The drink is considerably more successful than the infamous hot-dog-water cocktail, whose surviving cocktail wienies were recently discovered fossilized in the refrigerator.The intro proceeds with all the discipline of an unsupervised particle accelerator, bouncing through chicken-heart meat gum, the new Little House on the Prairie, Netflix’s live-action Avatar, From, The X-Files, The Odyssey, World Cup corruption, and an urgent philosophical debate over whether Dani Rojas is too precious to fuck. He is not. Science has spoken.History: [00:30:51]Abigail begins with the Tower of Babel and discovers that the entire biblical story is only nine verses long, despite centuries of Christians attaching an expanded cinematic universe to it. Genesis never says the builders wanted to storm heaven, overthrow God, survive another flood, or construct the tower under the supervision of Nimrod. It simply describes humanity building a city and a tower, followed by God scrambling their language and scattering them. The familiar Sunday School version is less biblical history than theological fan fiction with a surprisingly generous special-effects budget.The likely inspiration was Babylon itself, particularly the enormous ziggurat Etemenanki, whose construction required fired bricks, naturally occurring bitumen, cedar beams, centralized government, and a staggering amount of human labor. Babylon’s monumental architecture advertised the power of its kings and patron god Marduk, while the Hebrew writers had excellent reasons to hate the empire that conquered Judah, destroyed Jerusalem and its temple, and deported much of the population. The story therefore functions less as a warning against tall buildings and more as a Hebrew roast of imperial power, centralized authority, and Babylon’s enormous bricked-up civic penis.Abigail then launches into a speedrun through historical linguistics, explaining that languages do not suddenly appear, remain perfectly preserved, or decay from one original divine tongue. They drift through pronunciation, grammar, syntax, borrowed vocabulary, migration, conquest, trade, technology, jokes, and children imperfectly recreating the noises made by adults around them. Linguists can trace related words backward toward reconstructed language families such as Proto-Indo-European, but spoken sounds leave no fossils and there was never a single morning when everyone woke up speaking something new.That creates a particular problem for Mormonism, because the Book of Ether turns the confounding of languages into a literal historical event witnessed by Jared, the brother of Jared, their families, and the future passengers of several bitumen-sealed ocean barges. While other Christians can treat Babel as an etiological myth explaining linguistic diversity, Mormon scripture parks a wooden submarine directly in the middle of that escape route. The result is a doctrine chained to an ancient legend, a brief detour through Mahonri Moriancumr and the children of Aronek, and the devastating revelation that even humanity’s supposedly perfect original civilization still named one of its children Jared.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailThe episode opens with fetus-based parasitism, the dangers of keeping a child who returns from Cairo possessed by an evil mummy, and a brief pregnancy scare that ends with the baby being completely fine, folded into an anatomically disrespectful pretzel, and suddenly kicking nonstop. The group also detours through toddler hyperfixations, the ancient discovery that chickens are made of food, and the unsettling realization that Abigail’s coworkers have accidentally memorized his historical lectures.This week’s cocktail is The Bathilda Bagshot, a grandma-coded sparkling concoction made with Sprite, Aperol, grenadine, champagne, and violet syrup. The drink commemorates the hosts’ ongoing theory that Mitch McConnell and various Mormon patriarchs are not technically alive but merely skin sacks animated by one extremely determined evil snake. Pop culture then swallows the room whole, covering Jeff Arcuri’s crowd work, House of the Dragon, the aggressively horny new Wuthering Heights, Obsession, Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, internet racism about historical casting, John Bernthal’s urgent need to tell everyone something, and Taylor Swift’s billionaire wedding extravaganza summoning the Guillotine Girls once again.History: [00:39:01]Abigail introduces the central thesis of Freemasonry with a truth as old as civilization: boys love leveling up. Beginning with the Masonic legend of Hiram Abiff and Solomon’s Temple, she follows the mythology through the Knights Templar, whose actual history as crusading soldier-bankers was eventually alchemized into hidden treasure, secret knowledge, and medieval persecution fan fiction. From there, operative masonry, meaning men who were genuinely skilled at stacking rocks without killing anyone, evolves into speculative masonry, where the square becomes morality, the compass becomes self-restraint, and the rough stone becomes the imperfect man because apparently nothing can remain a normal tool once enough Enlightenment dudes gather in a tavern.The episode continues through the formation of England’s first Grand Lodge in 1717 and Adam Weishaupt’s short-lived Bavarian Illuminati, founded in 1776 after he essentially decided that Freemasonry was too expensive and started his own cooler secret club. Although the real Illuminati disappeared within about fifteen years, conspiracy culture inflated it into an immortal world government, aided by the same pattern-recognition slurry that later produced Wayfair child-trafficking theories and QAnon. Abigail ultimately frames fraternal orders as elaborate, ranked reconstructions of ordinary friendship and mutual aid: women bring soup when someone’s husband dies, while men appoint the Worshipful Junior Deputy Inner Sentinel of Extremely Normal Hats to authorize casserole distribution under Section 14. The conversation expands into male loneliness, emotional repression, AI companionship, and the radical possibility that men could simply hug their friends without first inventing 79 degrees of tit-touching secrecy.FHE: [01:46:39]Everyone now turns to the CES Letter’s section on the temple and Freemasonry, beginning with the conspicuous fact that Joseph Smith introduced the Nauvoo endowment only seven weeks after becoming a Mason. The group examines Heber C. Kimball’s claim that Mormonism possessed the “true masonry” supposedly preserved from Solomon’s Temple, then asks why God’s restored ancient ritual resembles the exact nineteenth-century Masonic ceremony Joseph had just experienced rather than any earlier form. The inventory of borrowed material includes the square and compass, garment and veil markings, names, tokens, signs, blood-oath penalties, and the intensely intimate Five Points of Fellowship, also known as therapy for touch-starved men but with substantially more knee contact.The hosts examine the church’s removal of the penalties and Five Points of Fellowship in 1990, along with the endowment’s continuing stream of “adjustments” that somehow never count as changes to an eternal and unalterable ordinance. This leads to the larger question of why an omniscient Heavenly Father would require his own children to present secret handshakes and memorized passwords before entering heaven. Personal temple memories provide the emotional underside: beige rooms, chlorine-soaked baptistries, borrowed white underwear, wet translucent jumpsuits, invasive nudity, polyester veils, and the disconnect between the transcendent spiritual experience everyone was promised and the deeply uncomfortable locker room they actually received. The episode is closed in the name of women, who managed to build communities of care without invented priesthood ranks, and with one final plea to humanity: men, just be gay.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailThe episode opens with the crew diving back into the second half of the CES Letter’s witnesses section, which means James Strang is back in the building wearing his tiny prophet tiara and demanding we respect his suspiciously better production design. Before the actual Strangery begins, aaaAAAaaa introduces the cocktail: the Raspberry Recanter, made with champagne, Château Monet raspberry liqueur, and “raspberries” that were spiritually witnessed as raspberries but, in mortality, were absolutely blackberries. The drink becomes its own mini-object lesson in Mormon testimony logic: if everyone signs a statement saying those berries were raspberries, who are we to question the sacred fruit affidavit?The intro then becomes a glorious pop culture pinball machine, bouncing from a smoothie shop encounter with a flat-earth-adjacent YouTube prophet, to the new Minions movie, to Tyra Banks’ cursed 2011 fantasy novel Modelland, featuring names so unhinged they should require ecclesiastical discipline. The crew also spirals through House of the Dragon, Netflix’s live-action Avatar, the “Take Me to Bangladesh” trend, and America’s looming 250th birthday, which no one is feeling especially patriotic about because, frankly, the vibes are rancid and the fireworks are banned.History: [00:35:45]Abigail uses James Strang as the entry point for a broader tour of 19th-century American religious weirdness, specifically the horny little prophet kingdoms that kept sprouting out of the Second Great Awakening like theological mushrooms after a cursed rainstorm. Rather than retelling Strang’s whole Beaver Island saga again, she frames him as part of a wider pattern: charismatic men claiming God had authorized them to redesign society, collect followers, control property, and stick their penises wherever revelation conveniently pointed. Christian perfectionism becomes the historical umbrella here: the idea that believers could become sanctified in this life, which, when mixed with restorationist logic and unchecked male ego, often produced cult startups with bonus sex spreadsheets.The segment covers Jacob Cochrane and the Cochraneites, whose spiritual wifery and proximity to early Mormon figures make Joseph Smith look less like an innovator and more like a guy shopping the regional prophet clearance rack. Then Abigail moves through Robert Matthews, later “Matthias,” a violent, unstable prophet figure whose orbit somehow included Sojourner Truth and a murder accusation involving Elijah Pearson and several plates of blackberries. The tour continues through the Battle Axes of Free Love Valley, Theophilus Ransom Gates’ nudist polyamorous Pennsylvania sect with an axe murder problem, John Humphrey Noyes’ Oneida Community with “complex marriage,” communal property, and extremely cursed sexual governance, and Thomas Lake Harris’ Brotherhood of the New Life, where celestial counterparts and divine heavy breathing somehow became a whole thing. The final takeaway: Strang did not invent the American prophet-king fantasy, but he did put rhinestones on the machinery.FHE: [01:24:52]aaaAAAaaabishoni brings the episode back to James Strang and the CES Letter’s critique of witness testimony, comparing Strang directly to Joseph Smith and concluding, with due disgust, that Strang may have been a bad guy but at least he put effort into the con. Strang claimed angelic visits, produced plates, gathered eleven witnesses, introduced scripture, and founded a church, basically doing the Joseph Smith checklist but with actual props. The Voree plates get special attention because unlike Joseph’s gold plates, Strang’s plates were physically handled, described in detail, allegedly unearthed from a clay box under established roots and a stone, and even displayed publicly before later vanishing into historical couch cushions. The crew walks through possible fraud mechanics, including the idea that Strang had months to prepare the site or may have bored in from an angle, accidentally benefiting from a conveniently dramatic buried stone like a prophet-themed escape room designer.The segment then turns the CES Letter’s witness argument back on Mormonism with a vengeance. If the church can dismiss Strang as a fraud even though most living Book of Mormon witnesses and much of Joseph Smith’s family accepted Strang’s prophetic claims, why does witness testimony suddenly become sacred-grade evidence only when it flatters Joseph? aaaAAAaaabishoni highlights the weakness of the Book of Mormon witness statements: no original document signed by all witnesses, no dates, no locations, family entanglements, excommunications, contradictory later statements, and Joseph’s proven talent for getting people to sign claims that were not true, including polygamy denials. The broader point lands hard: people have sincere, unretracted testimonies of Bigfoot, UFOs, aliens, and all manner of paranormal nonsense. Not recanting is not proof. And in the end, the whole witness issue is kneecapped by the rock-in-hat translation method anyway: ancient prophets allegedly engraved and preserved metal plates for centuries so Joseph could ignore them and dictate scripture from a hat like God’s dumbest magic trick. The episode closes in the name of Sojourner Truth, who did not do a murder, and with a final warning from the blackberry gospel: several plates is too many blackberries.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailThis week opens with Moroni en route from Arkansas, the hosts detouring through the linguistic crime scene of Mantua/“Man Away,” and Abish unveiling the episode cocktail: the “Spiritual Eyes-d Tea”, a peachy Long Island–adjacent blackout-adjacent beverage made with peach iced tea, peach rum, white rum, tequila, peach sparkling water, lemon “eyes,” and a cinnamon-stick “rod” in honor of Oliver Cowdery’s magical little treasure-finding situation. It is thematically perfect: fruity, boozy, spiritually questionable, and ready to help everyone see things that are absolutely not there.The intro then becomes a full brunch-table catastrophe buffet: Utah wildfires, Abish’s Vegas babymoon, Korean BBQ creating a digestive hostage crisis in a Nephi Maverik, Barnabas forgetting to book the lazy-river hotel, and the criminal offense of taking a catastrophic bathroom shit during someone else’s bubble bath. From there, the gang wanders through House of the Dragon despair, Voicemails for Isabelle, Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die, Widows Bay, The Muppets, SuperKitties as psychological torture, JoJo Siwa’s identity pinball machine, and buccal fat removal turning everyone into future Yzma.History: [00:37:26]Abigail’s history segment follows Francis Gladden Bishop, yet another post-Joseph Mormon splinter prophet candidate from the burned-over district’s apparently bottomless tote bag of self-appointed holy men. Born in 1809 to a mother who had already decided he was destined to “gladden” the hearts of the people, Bishop began as a Free Will Baptist preacher, joined the early LDS church in 1832, became a missionary, and then almost immediately started doing the one thing early Mormonism could never resist producing: declaring himself God’s newer, shinier special boy. Joseph Smith excommunicated him repeatedly, but Bishop kept coming back like a theological rash with pamphlets.After Joseph’s death, Bishop claimed he had been ordained by Jesus and one of the Three Nephites, possessed sacred Mormon relics including the gold plates, breastplate, Liahona, Sword of Laban, crowns representing priesthood authority, and somehow even the lost 116 pages. Martin Harris briefly glommed onto the movement, because of course he did. Bishop’s followers tried preaching in Salt Lake City, where Brigham Young responded from the pulpit with full knife-swinging frontier despot energy before later insisting everyone had misunderstood him, a classic “I only metaphorically threatened apostates with a Bowie knife” moment. The Gladdenites fizzled through Kirtland, Voree, Iowa, Nebraska orgy rumors, Colorado, and finally Salt Lake, where Bishop arrived to confront Brigham Young, got dodged for months, caught scarlet fever, died, and was reportedly buried in the wrong grave. A perfect ending for Mormonism’s Tobias Fünke of succession-crisis prophets.FHE: [01:32:55]The FHE segment digs into the CES Letter’s Book of Mormon witnesses section, with Moroni landing on the episode’s thesis like a glitter brick through a seminary window: the witnesses don’t really matter if Joseph Smith didn’t actually use the plates to translate the Book of Mormon. From there, the discussion unpacks the folk-magic soup everyone was swimming in: treasure digging, second sight, dowsing rods, divining rods, spiritual eyes, and Oliver Cowdery’s “gift of working with the rod,” later sanitized into the “gift of Aaron” because apparently the Lord’s branding department finally saw the problem.The hosts roast the credibility of the witnesses, especially Martin Harris, who emerges less as a rock-solid skeptical observer and more as a 19th-century magical worldview piñata. He reportedly saw Jesus as a deer, thought Christ was extremely handsome, described the devil as a sleek-haired donkey-headed fellow, interpreted candle sputtering as Satanic activity, and joined or endorsed multiple religious movements after Mormonism, including the Shakers and Gladden Bishop’s crew. David Whitmer gets dragged for angelic sightings that somehow had no shape, no appearance, and all the evidentiary density of a scented candle. Oliver Cowdery gets folded into the rod-based treasure-hunting lore, and the whole segment circles back to the obvious problem: if the plates were physically real and physically witnessed, why does everyone keep retreating into “spiritual eyes,” “visions,” “faith,” and extremely sweaty yes-but-no answers.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailFor the 150th episode, the gang celebrates their sesquicentennial, a word they unfortunately only know because Mormonism made everyone say it in a pioneer bonnet at some point. Claudia, Kish Kuhman, Moroni, Abish, and Abigail all rotate through the chaos chamber, with Kish Kuhman appearing like a surprise dad cryptid in Discord. The drink of the week is the High Priesthood, a blue, crossfaded sacrament of vodka, blue curaçao, Sprite, and a blue raspberry THC Ripple Stick, assembled via the sacred mixology method known as “pour and pray.” Kish Kuhman keeps it classy with bourbon on ice, while Claudia drinks from a chalice like a pregnant medieval duchess at girls’ night.The intro detours into Netflix’s Maternal Instincts, fetal abduction, fake ultrasound websites, Wade the Human Thumb, and the horrifying true crime spiral of Taylor Parker and Reagan Hancock. After staring directly into the murder abyss, the hosts recover with lighter pop-culture fare including The Burrows, Gina Davis’ Botox-adjacent facial mechanics, Zach Galifianakis’ gardening show, American food tourism TikToks, free refills as patriotism, and Abigail accidentally retelling the legendary story of catfishing a Mormon singles guy with a picture of Moroni in tiny running shorts. Happy Pride, apparently.FHE: [00:38:51]The FHE segment tackles the CES Letter’s Priesthood Restoration chapter, starting with Richard Bushman’s deliciously inconvenient observation that the late appearance of priesthood restoration accounts raises the possibility of later fabrication. The hosts walk through the basic problem: Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery supposedly received the priesthood in 1829, but the story does not show up in the church’s own record in the way modern Mormonism teaches it until years later. Even in 1832, the claims are vague, and the familiar John the Baptist / Peter, James, and John cinematic universe has not yet fully downloaded.The segment digs into the altered revelations between the 1833 Book of Commandments and the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants, where later language adds Moroni, Peter, James, and John like Joseph Smith patching continuity errors after the fandom noticed. The hosts also highlight the awkward Lyman Wight problem: if Joseph already had the Melchizedek Priesthood from ancient apostles, why do contemporary records say the high priesthood was first given in June 1831, with Lyman Wight ordaining Joseph? This becomes a roast of Joseph’s retroactive storytelling, “you didn’t ask” theology, and the sheer audacity of inventing divine authority after the fact, then expecting everyone to clap because a ghost allegedly laid hands on someone behind the narrative shrubs.The conversation wanders, blessedly, into priesthood restoration LARPing, old ward reenactments, Martin Harris’ grave, the Manti Pageant, roadshows, “Praise to the Man” being set to “Scotland the Brave,” and the spiritual genre of men in flour pretending to be resurrected apostles. The hosts also detour through Mountain Meadows, the church’s modern branding-heavy memorial presence, John D. Lee, Mike Lee, and the emotional violence of turning a massacre site into another church-logo reputation-management project. By the end, the priesthood restoration is less a sacred origin story and more Joseph Smith’s Scooby-Doo ghost costume getting yanked off in the reeds.HISTORY: [01:10:38]Abigail swerves away from yet another priesthood restoration rehash and instead gives us a “herstory” segment on Ina Donna Coolbrith, born Josephine Donna Smith, daughter of Agnes Coolbrith and Don Carlos Smith. Ina’s childhood comes preloaded with the usual 1800s Mormon misery DLC: Smith-family proximity, dead relatives, rumors about Joseph Smith fathering her, westward migration, abusive marriage, divorce, infant loss, and enough generational trauma to qualify as a pioneer heirloom quilt. Eventually she legally changes her name, drops the Smith baggage like a cursed handcart axle, and rebuilds herself as Ina Coolbrith.From there, Ina becomes a major figure in early California literary culture. She publishes poetry, works in San Francisco literary circles, co-edits the Overland Monthly, befriends people like Mark Twain, mentors a young Jack London as a librarian, and eventually becomes California’s first poet laureate. Abigail frames Ina as the perfect counterweight to the priesthood chapter: a woman who built an actual legacy without imaginary authority chains, ghostly handshakes, or a single ecclesiastical penis. The segment lands on the point that real power looks less like “special witnesses” and more like getting into the driver’s seat of your own life, even if Mormonism keeps handing twelve-year-old boys the keys.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailThe episode opens with the HeartSell, named after Bonneville Communications’ deeply cursed phrase for “strategic emotional advertising that stimulates response,” which is apparently what happens when Jesus hires Don Draper and gives him access to ward directories. The drink itself is a pink, spiritually manipulative little number made with Five Wives raspberry lemonade vodka, elderflower liqueur, lemon juice, bitters, cranberry juice, and Sprite, because nothing says “pure witness of the Spirit” like branding your own feelings into a sales funnel.The intro then pinballs through the usual sacred chaos: callbacks that have outlived their joke warranty, a proposed workplace security upgrade from “talk downs” to “put downs,” sober concert disappointment, Hoppers being an unhinged Pixar wildlife fever dream, the high school reunion clothes-bag crisis, “God is such a girl dad” TikTok theology getting launched directly into the sun, cult podcast detours, fairy smut logistics, and an accidental seminar on orgasms that somehow still feels more epistemologically sound than Moroni’s promise.History: [00:33:53]Abigail’s history segment takes the CES Letter’s spiritual witness problem and sails it directly to Jolly Old England with Matthew Philip Gill, a British former Latter-day Saint who claimed angelic visitations, brass plates, interpreters, new scripture, and a restored church, because apparently Joseph Smith’s whole thing needed a BBC reboot. Raised in Mormonism and fluent in its emotional vocabulary, Gill claimed that Moroni visited him as a child and that Raphael later told him a divine gift was coming. After deciding the LDS Church was doing the sacrament wrong, he left and eventually produced the Chronicles of the Children of Aaronek, including the Book of Jeraneck, a new ancient record about Hebrew-adjacent people migrating to Britain after the Tower of Babel and building Stonehenge as a temple.The hosts gleefully unpack how Gill’s story mirrors Joseph Smith’s almost beat for beat: angelic messengers, ancient metal plates, a special translator, a hidden sacred record, a last prophet preserving the story of a destroyed people, and a modern man claiming the title of prophet, seer, revelator, and translator. The only real difference is that Gill’s version comes with Stonehenge, National Treasure-style 3D glasses, Hobbit-font website energy, and an alarming number of names ending in “-neck.” The segment’s central burn is that mainstream Mormons can immediately see Gill’s claims as absurd, but only because they are standing outside the story. From that angle, the whole thing becomes an inconvenient British mirror held up to Joseph Smith, complete with brass plates, bad typography, and neck-based scripture lore.FHE: [01:26:23]The FHE/CES Letter discussion breaks down the central problem with spiritual witnesses: every religion has people who sincerely feel that God, the Spirit, the universe, or some emotionally resonant internal kazoo has confirmed their beliefs are true. The hosts compare LDS, FLDS, RLDS, and Latter Day Church of Jesus Christ testimonies, pointing out that they all sound suspiciously like they were made from the same testimony casserole: “I know Joseph Smith was a prophet, I know this church is true, I know this guy with a new book and a blurry Jesus picture is God’s special boy.” Which raises the obvious problem: if contradictory religions all produce the same feelings, maybe the feelings are not the truth detector.The segment also digs into the unreliability of revelation, including Joseph Smith’s failed Canada copyright revelation and the deeply convenient explanation that some revelations are from God, some are from man, and some are from the devil. The hosts roast the idea that members are supposed to trust prophetic discernment when even the prophet apparently cannot tell whether he has God, ego, or Satan on the line. From there, they take on Boyd K. Packer’s “a testimony is found in the bearing of it,” fast and testimony meeting anxiety, faith being redefined as believing against evidence, Paul H. Dunn’s fake faith-promoting stories, patriarchal blessings as life GPS, and the church’s habit of taking normal human awe, connection, music, nature, mushrooms, and emotion, then slapping a “Property of the Holy Ghost” sticker on it.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailAbigail opens the episode by officially declaring everyone “babies,” because pregnancy has apparently turned the podcast into a haunted nursery with better swearing. The drink this week is the Kinderhook, Line, and Sinker, inspired by an Instagram reel and made to look like a tiny aquarium: orange peel cut into fish shapes, rosemary as aquatic garnish drama, Nerds as fish gravel, and equal parts Calypso Ocean Blue Lemonade and UV Blue. It is adorable, alarmingly alcoholic, and aesthetically the closest Mormon hoax culture has ever come to being served in a cup.The intro spirals beautifully through the usual GASP ecosystem: pregnancy digestion discourse, a brutally spicy Calabrian chili pizza incident, emergency McDonald’s milkshake intervention, Claudia’s wedding with angry bridal chickens, Vegas adventures at the Sphere and Meow Wolf, buffet lobster confusion, Four Seasons friendship taxonomy, Coleman Domingo devotion, Sheep Detective, Daniel Craig’s general erotic menace, and an argument over whether the new James Bond video game man is hot or just a generic white guy rendered by a bored algorithm.History: [00:38:30]Abigail uses the Kinderhook Plates as a doorway into the Golden Age of Hoaxes, when nineteenth-century America was basically a novelty factory powered by cheap newspapers, spiritualism, fake relics, public spectacle, and white people trying to Bible-fy everything they found in the dirt. She gives the quick version of the Kinderhook scam, where some dudes made fake plates, buried them, “found” them, and handed them to Joseph Smith because he had unfortunately branded himself as the ancient-metal-plate guy. Then she zooms out to the Cardiff Giant, PT Barnum making a fake version of an already fake giant, and the extremely American legal conclusion that you cannot counterfeit a counterfeit.From there, Abigail drags the whole genre of fake Hebrew artifacts, mound-builder myths, Utah desert folklore, and Mormon treasure fantasies through the evidence shredder. The Brewer Cave/Manti Cave legend gets special treatment, complete with alleged giant mummies in metal armor, blonde and red hair, stone boxes, Jaredites, glowing angel Ether, secret maps, and BYU people occasionally almost doing actual scholarship before Paul R. Cheesman wanders in like a gullibility raccoon. The segment also detours through Montezuma’s treasure legends near Kanab, Lovelock Cave red-haired giants, Nephilim nonsense, Blind Frog Ranch vibes, and Graham Hancock getting verbally shoved into the academic trash compactor. Abigail’s closing thesis is clean: real archaeology has context, dating, material culture, stratigraphy, and evidence. Hoax archaeology has “trust me, bro, the Smithsonian hid the giant bones.”FHE: [01:40:06]aaaAAAaaa takes the Kinderhook Plates into full family-home-evening fever dream by explaining how Joseph Smith’s “translation” process is only slightly more rigorous than putting a rock in a hat and asking your friends for Mad Libs. After roasting Joseph for failing the Book of Abraham, failing the Kinderhook Plates, and therefore not exactly earning the benefit of the doubt on the Book of Mormon, aaaAAAaaa produces a white top hat, a rock, and a sacred participatory activity from the Lord, apparently. Abigail and Moroni are conscripted as scribes for a fake ancient translation, contributing words like Bartholomew, the Unbroken, penis, Oxyrhynchus, monkey paw, proto-Indo-European, pangolin, the spiciest pizza ever, and the ruby of Dunshire.The resulting “translation” is a glorious scripture-flavored garbage hymn about Bartholomew the Unbroken, whose penis is compared unto a pangolin, who dwells in Oxyrhynchus, eats the spiciest pizza ever, descends from Pedro Pascal, and receives the sacred word “Porphyryus,” meaning “give me five dollars and do not ask follow-up questions.” The bit works because it makes the point without needing a whiteboard: if Joseph’s translation method is functionally indistinguishable from chaotic hat-based improv, maybe the problem is not that critics lack faith. Maybe the problem is that the prophet keeps trying to sell clunkers from the same cursed dealership.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailThe episode opens with the crew already several sips into the "False Doctrini", a “martini” only in the sense that Mormon doctrine is “unchanging”: technically presented with confidence, spiritually fraudulent, and dressed up in the right glassware. Abigail explains that the drink is raspberry lemonade mixed with Five Wives pink raspberry lemonade vodka, shaken up as a false doctrine tribute to polygamy, God changing his mind, and the sacred LDS art of pretending yesterday’s eternal truth was merely a seasonal accent wall.The intro then derails beautifully through pop culture and moral panic: Andy Serkis allegedly doing Animal Farm dirty, true crime rage over The Crash, bishlet news, non-gay hockey romance with suspiciously emotionally literate men, Lord of the Flies, Widow’s Bay, drunk escape rooms, secret Murphy doors, and the eternal question of whether every respectable basement should contain either hidden booze or an ominous interrogation chair. The vibe is raspberry lemonade chaos with a little legal deposition energy and just enough podcast-host ADHD to qualify as liturgy. History: [00:22:59]Abigail’s history segment starts with the question “what is a prophet?” and immediately answers it with the spiritual precision of a brick through a stained-glass window: an audacious bullshit mediocre man. She breaks down “prophet, seer, and revelator” as less three distinct divine job titles and more one corporate Mormon leadership smoothie, then pivots into prophecy as historical interpretation rather than fortune-telling. Revelation gets reframed as anti-imperial political theology in dragon clothes, not a spooky end-times spreadsheet, which leads to the real test: if prophets cannot correctly interpret the moral emergencies happening right in front of their stupid faces, what exactly are we calling prophecy?The main historical meat is Spencer W. “Spanker Wanker” Kimball, whose pedigree Mormon lineage, Arizona childhood, illnesses, apostleship, and presidency become a case study in how one sad biography and one raspy voice do not magically produce moral authority. Abigail covers The Miracle of Forgiveness, its sexual shame machinery, its victim-blaming rape rhetoric, its masturbation panic, and its explicit harm to queer members. She also digs into Kimball’s role in racist teachings about Native Americans and the Indian Placement Program, then connects his presidency to the 1978 priesthood and temple ban reversal. The segment’s thesis lands hard: prophets did not need supernatural revelation to know racism, coercion, homophobia, and sexual shame were harming people. They needed the courage to tell the truth when truth threatened their own power, and historically, the brethren chose the folding chair marked “institutional cowardice.” FHE: [01:43:24]The FHE segment turns to the CES Letter’s Prophets section, where aaaAAAaaa notes that Jeremy Runnells has clearly moved past humble question-asker and entered his “I have receipts and rage” era. The crew walks through the chapter’s recurring indictment: yesterday’s doctrine is today’s false doctrine, and yesterday’s prophet is today’s heretic. They hit Adam-God theory, blood atonement, polygamy, the priesthood and temple ban, and the eternal LDS shell game where leaders claim they cannot lead the church astray until the church needs to quietly shove an old prophet under the doctrinal bus.The discussion gets especially sharp around Brigham Young, Spencer W. Kimball, Gordon B. Hinckley’s Larry King polygamy dodge, Brazil and the logistical collapse of racial gatekeeping, and the financial/institutional pressures surrounding church reversals. The Mark Hofmann section becomes a full discernment autopsy: prophets, seers, and revelators failed to spot a forger and murderer sitting under their noses, while the Tanners, actual professional church critics, had better instincts about the Salamander Letter. The episode then takes a long political detour through Mamdani, Jeff Bezos, city-owned grocery stores, Trump phones, gerontocracy, psychedelics, Barbie vans, toxic men, and baby prison, because apparently no CES Letter discussion is complete until someone has proposed a DMT-powered rebirth canal museum visible from space. Somehow, it all circles back to the core point: if someone claims to speak for God, the bare minimum should be causing less harm than the average elected goblin with a podcast mic.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailTo celebrate Joseph Smith’s sacred calling to spiritually wife other men’s wives, aaaAAAaaa serves up the Orson Hide and Seek, named for Apostle Orson Hyde, who was conveniently away dedicating Palestine while Joseph secretly married his wife, Marinda. The drink combines Utah-made Stinger hard apple cider with a hidden shot dropped into the glass, because nothing says “restored gospel” like a surprise second relationship concealed inside the first one.The intro immediately wanders into beautifully unnecessary territory: fake temple wedding photos taken at prom, the anatomical inappropriateness of the word “erected” appearing anywhere near a temple, post-half-marathon stair descent, Alan Parsons Project arena music, Apple TV betrayals, HBO’s Neighbors, and the revelation that Mel Gibson is making a two-part, multiple-timeline, Satan-origin-story sequel to The Passion of the Christ. The overall vibe is cider, sore quads, neighbor feuds, and everyone slowly realizing that reality has fired parody and taken its job.History: [00:26:40]Abigail begins with the “Law of Sarah,” the biblical consent loophole Mormon polygamy borrowed from the story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, an enslaved woman whose reproductive exploitation somehow became inspirational source material for religious men looking to make their erections doctrinal. From there, the segment traces the recurring historical pattern of powerful men finding ancient scripture and announcing that their penis has a biblical precedent: early Christian clergy keeping supposedly chaste “spiritual” women in their homes, church councils having to explicitly outlaw decorative live-in virgins, Protestant rulers rummaging through Abraham for permission to take second wives, and Puritanism turning sex into something intensely policed rather than remotely healthy.The segment then connects that same architecture of control to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, emphasizing that Gilead’s use of Hagar, coerced reproduction, religious hierarchy, and ownership of women was assembled from things societies have actually done. Abigail brings the argument home through Mormon purity culture, where women are trained to treat sexual desire as contamination until marriage, then expected to become sexually available overnight. In that system, Joseph Smith’s marriages to teenage girls are not rendered harmless by claims that they may have been “eternity only”; placing a child in a marriage-shaped relationship with a prophet who controls her family’s salvation is already coercive. The segment closes with the only reasonable theological conclusion: purity culture is bullshit, subjugating women is bullshit, and any man attempting the latter should prepare for an extremely hostile review of his genitals.FHE: 01:22:47For this week’s Family Home Evening from hell, Moroni takes the group through the CES Letter’s section on Joseph Smith’s polygamy and polyandry, beginning with the fact that many members were raised on the polished Emma-and-Joseph love story while being told absolutely nothing about the other thirty-something women in the celestial waiting room. The discussion focuses on Joseph’s marriages to women already married to living husbands, including Marinda Hyde while Orson Hyde was away on a mission, and the Church’s attempt to soften the whole thing by suggesting some of the relationships were merely dynastic or eternal. The hosts immediately identify the gaping problem: if sealing families together was the point, why was Joseph sealed to other men’s wives and teenage girls before being sealed to his own children?The group then works through the ways Joseph violated the rules supposedly revealed in Doctrine and Covenants 132: marrying already-married women, keeping unions secret from husbands and Emma, taking teenage girls and women who were obviously not virgins, marrying mother-daughter and sister sets, and using promises of exaltation or angel-with-a-sword threats as divine coercion. The rage reaches operatic levels with the Fanny Alger barn account, sworn statements denying polygamy from people participating in it, and the realization that “Praise to the Man” was apparently written about a man whose actual modus operandi involved secrecy, dishonesty, and spiritually branded sexual predation.The episode ends by placing Joseph Smith beside Warren Jeffs in an absolutely damning side-by-side comparison: many wives, underage wives, married women, mother-daughter pairings, sister wives, and the same prophetic authorization structure used to turn abuse into obedience. Warren Jeffs may have pressed the accelerator through the floor, but the road map was already there. After surviving the ecclesiastical sewage fire, the group regains just enough emotional stability to praise Oscar, a tiny Jack Russell puppy, instead of any dead prophet. Dog man.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailThe gang welcomes Moroni back, in the flesh, for another papyrus-themed adventure with the “POG-pyrus”, a frozen tropical concoction made from guava nectar, passion fruit rum, vodka, sweetened condensed milk, and POG soda, churned through Abigail and aaaAAAaaa’s Costco Ninja Slushi machine. The drink is visually promised to be a creamy, swirly Egyptian artifact of delight, although its alcohol apparently settles at the bottom like an archaeological layer waiting to ambush whoever reaches it first.The intro wanders gloriously through weaponized Song of Solomon reading during temple baptisms, raising children with honest conversations about death and anatomy, mortifying old Gmail archaeology featuring Moroni’s dream destination of “probably Costco,” and the usual pop-culture buffet: Beef, The Boys accidentally predicting Trump’s gold-idol aesthetic, Ted Danson continuing to age like a flirtatious national treasure in Man on the Inside, and the horrifyingly tactile tongue-based kissing gameplay in Mixtape. The hosts also celebrate the Bishlet turning three, condemn the tiny terrorists at Play-Doh and Fisher-Price who design noisy toddler toys, and give overdue love to listener P. Luke Firestoker for supplying the podcast with delightfully unhinged fake advertisements.  HISTORY: [00:27:41]Abigail brings history back to the Book of Abraham through a much better mummy story: a recently excavated Roman-era mummy from Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, found with a piece of papyrus deliberately placed on his body. Unlike Hor’s thoroughly ordinary funerary text that Joseph Smith spun into Abrahamic revelation, this papyrus reportedly contains a passage from Homer’s Iliad. Not just any dramatic passage about Achilles, grief, glory, or mortality, either. It is from the Catalogue of Ships, essentially the ancient world’s extended boat roster. Naturally, the hosts arrive at the only spiritually satisfying interpretation: this sweet mummy was autistic and loved boats.From there, the segment becomes an ecstatic sermon on archaeological garbage. Abigail explains how Oxyrhynchus became one of the richest sources of ancient papyrus fragments because the city’s dry rubbish heaps preserved discarded receipts, contracts, letters, magical texts, literary fragments, early Christian manuscripts, and probably at least some ancient smut. The city becomes the perfect rebuttal to Book of Abraham apologetics: yes, mummies can be buried with unexpected texts, including literature. But when trained scholars identify a papyrus as a passage listing ships, they do not get to announce that it secretly says, “Dear diary, it’s me, Abraham.” The true doctrine of the segment is simple and beautiful: history may belong to the victors, but garbage tells the truth.  FHE: [01:29:56]The hosts dive into the CES Letter’s Book of Abraham section, beginning with the Church’s own acknowledgment that Egyptologists agree the surviving papyrus fragments do not match Joseph Smith’s translation and are instead standard funerary texts dating long after Abraham. The hosts are less than impressed by an institution that effectively presents the evidence against itself and then asks members to believe harder anyway. They walk through the facsimiles and revel in Joseph’s catastrophic misses: the crocodile’s watery environment turned into cosmic theology, a funerary offering table upgraded into Abraham’s sacrificial altar, and the fertility god Min, visibly sporting an erection, identified by Joseph as God sitting on his throne revealing priesthood secrets. Heavenly Father, apparently, was having an extremely casual throne day.The discussion also tears into the parts Joseph labeled as revelations that “ought not to be revealed at the present time,” despite modern scholars being fully capable of reading them, and into the Book of Abraham’s heavy dependence on King James Bible wording centuries too late for an ancient Abrahamic record. The hosts discuss Robert Ritner’s rebuttal to the Church’s essay, especially his argument that the surviving papyri, facsimiles, and Joseph’s own Egyptian-language materials point directly to him producing religious text from Egyptian he did not understand. Jeffrey R. Holland’s evasive BBC defense of the translation gets dragged as well: calling something the word of God while admitting you do not understand how it was translated is not an answer so much as a theological shrug in a suit. The episode closes by returning to the season’s central frustration: members were taught the cleanest, most digestible version of Mormon history because the actual version sounds exactly as bizarre as it is. In the name of the sweet artistic mummy and garbage, amen.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailThis week’s cocktail, Two Personages, One Cup, somehow manages to be both doctrinally relevant and spiritually prosecutable. aaaAAAaaa introduces the drink for an episode covering the Book of Mormon translation and First Vision sections of the CES Letter, combining chocolate Crown Royal and blackberry Crown Royal with a symbolic seer stone dropped into the glass, because nothing says “restored gospel” like a liquor cup full of prophetic sediment. The hosts also clarify that Google strongly advised against freezing random rocks and using them as drink-chilling whiskey stones, because apparently even the internet has stronger health-and-safety standards than early Mormon translation procedure.The intro wanders beautifully through root canals, magic bone goop, cruise ship viruses, emergency dental trauma, dishwasher suffering, pioneer ancestor resentment, Met Gala capitalism, Sarah Paulson’s dollar mask, Heidi Klum understanding the assignment, and various pop culture detours including Death by Lightning, The Devil Wears Prada 2, They Will Kill You, and Shrinking. The vibe is deeply “we came here to discuss Joseph Smith, but first let’s litigate whether rocks can leak into your drink.”HISTORY: [00:43:26]Abigail uses the First Vision’s “creeds are an abomination” line as a launchpad into the ancient theological cage match known as Trinitarianism. She breaks down what a creed is, why the Nicene Creed mattered, and how early Christianity had to figure out whether Jesus was fully God, sort of God, God in a human suit, God’s special boy, or just a divine receptionist with excellent sandals. The segment covers Arianism, Arius’s idea that “there was when he was not,” and the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, where bishops tried to settle whether Jesus was made of the same divine God-goo as the Father.The history then moves through the expanded 381 version of the Nicene Creed, the nightmare Greek word homoousios, and the Holy Ghost problem, which Abigail frames as Christianity’s eternal “also there’s a ghost, don’t worry about it” clause. From there, she connects the whole mess back to Mormonism: Joseph Smith’s official First Vision account explicitly rejects Christian creeds, while later LDS theology insists the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are separate beings united in purpose but not substance. The segment ends with the larger point that asking whether Mormons are “Christian” depends entirely on who gets to define Christianity: belief in Jesus, historical continuity, creedal orthodoxy, or just who signed the theological terms and conditions in 381.FHE: [01:37:33]FHE opens with the CES Letter’s section on the Book of Mormon translation, especially the now-infamous rock-in-the-hat method. aaaAAAaaa reads the Richard Bushman quote acknowledging that Church artwork showing Joseph studying gold plates is historically inaccurate, which leads the hosts into the obvious question: if Joseph translated by staring at a stone in a hat, what were the plates even for? The group roasts the narrative whiplash of a religion built around gold plates that allegedly had to be protected, witnessed, hauled through forests, hidden from mobs, and guarded by angels, only for the actual “translation” to happen through a treasure-digging rock in a hat while the plates were covered, nearby, in another room, or functionally irrelevant.The segment also digs into the Church’s later admissions in the Gospel Topics essay and the 2015 Ensign seer stone photo, contrasting that with earlier apologetic material from BYU religion professors who rejected David Whitmer’s rock-in-hat account precisely because it made the plates unnecessary. The hosts point out the absurdity of faithful scholars once arguing “obviously that can’t be how heaven works,” only for the Church to later quietly say, “actually yes, that is how the hat magic worked.” They also discuss the long-standing Church art problem: majestic Joseph lovingly studying gold plates versus the historically messier image of a man burying his face in a hat while Oliver Cowdery takes dictation from the other side of the spiritual cubicle.The second half turns to the First Vision, starting with Gordon B. Hinckley’s claim that the whole Church rests on whether the First Vision happened. The hosts walk through the CES Letter’s summary of the multiple accounts: the 1832 handwritten account, two 1835 accounts, the official 1838 version, and the 1842 account. The 1832 account gets special attention because it contains only “the Lord,” lacks the familiar two-personage setup, says Joseph already believed no true church existed, focuses on forgiveness of sins rather than asking which church to join, and places Joseph in the sixteenth year of his age. From there, the group highlights the contradictions: who appeared, how old Joseph was, why he prayed, whether Satan attacked him, whether a revival actually happened in Palmyra in 1820, and why the First Vision seems to have received little to no public emphasis in the Church’s earliest years.By the end, the hosts frame both sections as examples of the same broader Mormon problem: the Church teaches a polished, coherent version until historical details become impossible to hide, then expects members to pretend the weird version was available and obvious all along. The translation story leaves the plates dangling as a massive plot hole, while the First Vision accounts turn the founding event of the Restoration into a shifting theological rough draft. The episode closes with the hosts encouraging listeners to join the Discord.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailThe crew returns from hiatus for season four with a surprise Moroni appearance, several deeply necessary pizza-related clues, and the announcement that this season will tackle the CES Letter instead of another book of scripture, because frankly, the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price have already been dragged around the block wearing tap shoes.This week’s drink is the Anachronagroni, inspired by the Book of Mormon’s greatest hits of temporal nonsense. It’s built like a familiar cocktail from the wrong century: gin, Aperol, mezcal, sweet vermouth, bitters, and a blood orange garnish that initially appears to be a small citrus crime scene. The result is smoky, boozy, weirdly beautiful, and deeply appropriate for an episode about horses, steel, tapirs, and ancient scripture that somehow knows the 1769 King James Bible better than ancient America.History: [00:37:12]Abigail opens the history segment with a season-opener called “The Most Correct Book of 1769,” using the Book of Mormon’s King James Bible problem as the trapdoor into the larger issue: sounding scriptural does not mean sounding ancient. She walks through how the KJV became the default English-language sound of sacred authority, not because God speaks in thee-thou theater kid diction, but because centuries of printing, preaching, memorizing, editing, and standardizing trained English speakers to hear that cadence as “Bible.” The episode lingers especially on the 1769 Oxford edition edited by Benjamin Blayney, whose spelling, punctuation, marginal references, and italicization practices shaped the version of the KJV Joseph Smith likely knew.From there, Abigail turns the Bible into a cursed production history: William Tyndale, Coverdale, the Great Bible, the Bishops’ Bible, the King James Bible, Benjamin Blayney, and finally Joseph Smith’s Bible-flavored religious cosplay. There’s also a glorious detour into the 1631 “Wicked Bible,” whose missing “not” accidentally turned the commandment into “thou shalt commit adultery,” plus a damaged printing that made Deuteronomy describe God showing off his “great ass.” The bigger point, beneath the righteous giggling, is that the Bible itself is a long chain of copying, translation, correction, editorial choice, theology, cultural assumption, and occasional heresy-flavored slap fight.FHE: [01:29:20]The Book Club segment shifts into the first CES Letter section, Book of Mormon, with Abish giving background on Jeremy Runnells, the document’s origin, and why it spread so effectively. The CES Letter began as a collection of sincere questions from a believing Mormon trying to reconcile problems with LDS truth claims, not as a polished anti-Mormon manifesto. After receiving no official church response, it spread through Reddit, Facebook, Mormon forums, blogs, Mormon Stories, MormonThink, and ex-Mormon communities, becoming a portable faith-crisis packet for people who previously had to explain their broken shelves one awkward citation at a time. The group also notes that the Church still has not published a direct official rebuttal, leaving most responses to FAIR, Sarah Allen, Jim Bennett, apologists, podcasters, YouTubers, and other members of the unpaid “please make this make sense” brigade.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailThis week Moroni is back in town and we discuss the recent Netflix docuseries "Trust Me: The False Prophet". All about bad bitch Christine Marie who goes undercover to document the beginning and rise of an FLDS spin off. But, first we talk about what we did over our break.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailAbish kicks off the final Pearl of Great Price episode with a beverage that feels appropriately Utah-coded: the Still Small Spritzer. The recipe is delightfully chaotic and deeply on-brand. Step one is living within DoorDash range of Swig so you can order a sugary soda concoction (sparkling water with fruit syrups) and have it delivered like the Spirit itself descending from on high. Step two is adding Malibu and vodka “measured with your heart,” because the Spirit of Revelation apparently also governs alcohol ratios. The hosts report that the result is extremely drinkable, occasionally Malibu-forward if you forget to stir it, and broadly effective at getting everyone into the right mood to talk about Mormon primary indoctrination.Scriptures: [00:23:08]Instead of a traditional scripture breakdown, aaaAAAaaa launches the segment by playing the church’s official Articles of Faith children’s choir recordings, which immediately turns the podcast into something resembling a haunted Primary program. The hosts listen live and react in real time as Victorian-sounding organ arrangements and eerily enthusiastic children chant Joseph Smith’s theological bullet points. Commentary ranges from bafflement at the bizarre musical choices to jokes about building a haunted house where every room contains a different ghostly child singing an Article of Faith.Church Teachings: [00:36:26]Moroni steps in to explain the actual history of the Articles of Faith, revealing that they began not as revelation but as public relations. In 1842, Chicago newspaper editor John Wentworth asked Joseph Smith to explain Mormonism for a broader audience. Smith responded with what is now known as the Wentworth Letter, which summarized church history and ended with thirteen concise statements describing Mormon beliefs. Those statements became the Articles of Faith, essentially functioning as a nineteenth-century missionary pamphlet meant to make Mormonism sound normal and familiar to outsiders. History: [00:53:51]For the history segment, Abigail decides to close out the Pearl of Great Price era with something less lecture-heavy and more chaotic: a game built around the Articles of Faith songs themselves. Instead of presenting a traditional research segment, she surprises the hosts with the church’s official musical versions and invites everyone to react, critique, and riff as they listen.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailaaaAAAaaa opens with peak chaotic-table energy: ASMR jokes, factory-noise soundscape pitching, and the general vibe of “we are spiritually unwell but comedically hydrated.” The episode’s drink is the Gin Anthonic, a gin-and-tonic riff that swaps tonic for champagne (Saturday-morning lawlessness), plus muddled peach and whatever sweetener is on hand, built to match the Anthon-manuscript theme without requiring anyone to pretend they’re classy.Scriptures: [00:25:49]Moroni tackles JSH 1:43 to the end, framing it as Joseph’s “most intense night of insomnia in American religious history,” with Moroni doing the “per my last revelation” bit as the angel returns again and again like a divine auto-reply. He spotlights the story beats: repeated nighttime visits, Joseph collapsing from exhaustion, the annual “come back in one year” plate-tease, and then the 1827 handoff where the plates supposedly become the hottest stolen-object in upstate New York despite also allegedly weighing an absurd amount.Church Teachings: [00:46:11]Abish digs into what the modern church tries to do with the Charles Anthon story: it becomes a tidy faith-parable about Isaiah 29 (“the learned man can’t read a sealed book”), with Anthon cast as the learned man, Joseph as the humble unlearned underdog, and the plates as prophecy fulfillment. The manual-friendly takeaway is basically: scholarship can’t birth scripture, faith does; and also please stop asking why Joseph needed academic validation if God already told him everything.History: [01:04:59]Abigail takes the Anthon-manuscript thread and yanks it straight into the 1980s with Mark Hofmann, pitching him as the most Joseph-Smith-compatible criminal imaginable: a document dealer who understood exactly what collectors and the church wanted to be true, and built a business selling “missing link” artifacts that felt emotionally consequential. She walks through his methods at a high level (mixing authentic material with altered and forged items, using period materials, artificial aging, and building credibility through plausibility) and then lands on the irony that discernment somehow never showed up to work.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailMoroni rolled in with “Brightness Above the Sun”, a bubbly pink-lemonade situation spiked with “a shot and a half” (measured emotionally, not metrically), topped with Sprite, and generally engineered to be impossible to mess up unless you actively hate joy. The vibe was: Olympics chatter, political despair snacks (State of the Union avoidance, assorted internet clips), and then a hard pivot into “we finished the PoGP… and Joseph still has more content to punish us with,” as you officially marched into Joseph Smith’s self-published history. Pop culture tangents did what they do: figure skating awe, a brief tour through hot celebrities and chaos, and the recurring theme that nobody in this economy has the emotional bandwidth for the world, but everyone can still be loyal to lemonade + bubbles. Scriptures: [00:20:38]Abish took the first half of JS-H 1:1–42 and basically ran a “Joseph Smith, but with an editor” intervention: reading the long, exhausting verses, then immediately translating them into what Joseph could have said if he weren’t allergic to brevity. The segment hit the big beats (Joseph setting the record straight, the church-fight chaos, the grove, the “I was gagged by darkness” moment, persecution-as-proof, and then Moroni showing up like an overcaffeinated Bible audiobook) with constant side-eye at how Joseph somehow remembers angel ankles and bosom details but can’t be bothered to write down “many other passages.”The running joke was that Joseph writes like a high schooler padding a word count, except the grade is “new religion” and the penalty for failure is that your whole extended family still can’t buy wine at Trader Joe’s.Church Teachings: [00:39:23]aaaAAAaaa framed JS-H 1:1–42 as an origin story that quietly installs an “epistemic immune system,” then introduced the distinction between immunizing strategies (external, ad hoc protective arguments) and epistemic defense mechanisms (internal, structural features that make the belief system self-sealing). From there, the segment read straight through the pattern: Joseph pre-labeling critics as malicious, controversy being treated as proof, and controlled access to evidence, then showing how later Church messaging echoes the same posture with “don’t study through defectors” and “ignore anti material.”Then you zoomed out to compare the same mechanisms in other high-control environments: disconfirmation that strengthens commitment, “don’t listen to antagonists,” coercive inner-circle leverage, and the “apostate material” contamination framing, with the hosts interjecting the obvious: if the institution had nothing to fear, it wouldn’t need a whole toolkit devoted to information quarantine.History: [01:01:23]Abigail took the “multiple First Visions” rabbit hole and just kept digging until the tunnel reached the Earth’s core: laying out that historians compare at least nine major accounts, split between Joseph’s own later tellings and secondhand contemporary reports, and then walking through how the story shifts depending on when it’s told and who it’s told to. The thread running through it was myth-making: early versions reading more like personal religious crisis, later versions evolving into a polished institutional origin narrative built to justify authority, define enemies, and carry the whole Restoration payload.The segment landed on why the 1838 account “won”: earlier accounts weren’t widely circulated, the later one was structurally optimized for legitimacy, and once canonized it trained members to treat it as the story rather than one of many evolving tellings.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailAbish and Abigail roll in already half-dead from a same-day work raid on Rexburg (Potato BYU), plus the usual modern plagues: a Tesla pothole incident that turns into “surprise, you’re buying four tires,” a Unisom gamble, and a toddler on a sacred quest for the One Blanket That Was In The Car The Whole Time. Drink-wise, Abish delivers the Highly Flavored. It’s Trader Joe’s seasonal sparkling strawberry soda + TJ’s fresh limeade, spiked with a casual ounce-ish of Malibu and an ounce-ish of vanilla vodka, poured over ice and topped for a cute layered look that does not resemble hot dog water (growth). Pop culture detours include rage-fantasies about accountability, the deeply cursed optics of shirtless powerful men, and the joyful chaos of watching survival content where the true villain is always some small, relentless weasel with an agenda. Scriptures: [00:32:44]aaaAAAaaa shows up with an exmo power tool: a normalized diff. They explain how they pulled Matthew 24 (KJV) and Joseph Smith—Matthew into a repo, lined the passages up, and used a visual diff (plus AI help) to get painfully granular about what’s “Matthew” and what’s “Joe doing jazz hands over Matthew’s chord chart.” The segment frames the KJV as a single, interleaved Olivet Discourse, while Joseph Smith—Matthew is portrayed as a reshuffle-and-expand job that tries to separate the “Jerusalem gets wrecked” timeline from the “Second Coming” timeline, mainly by adding clarifiers, moving blocks around, and sprinkling covenant-y emphasis like it’s garlic powder. Church Teachings: [00:57:39]Moroni tackles the “why is this random chunk even here?” question: why would Joseph Smith toss an apocalyptic rewrite of Matthew 24 into the Pearl of Great Price like an unrelated DLC? The segment argues it feels oddly placed narratively, but starts making more sense when you treat early Mormonism as aggressively end-times-coded: not “one day Jesus will return,” but “we are literally living in the countdown timer era.” From that angle, Matthew 24 wasn’t obscure to early Saints, it was mission-critical content. History: [01:09:13]Abigail returns triumphantly to Egypt Corner, essentially admitting this is a continuation of last week’s “wait, WHAT” Wikipedia spiral. She digs deeper into the mummy-and-papyri economy around Michael Chandler’s mummy-selling tour (a sentence that should not exist, and yet), including how many mummies were in circulation and how bizarrely bad people were at tracking where the bodies and papyri ended up. The tone stays fixed on the absurdity that “anyone can buy a mummy” was just… a normal thing for a while, and on how that context feeds directly into Joseph’s confident scripture-production hustle. Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailThe hosts kick off this episode with their signature chaotic energy, mixing up a Bailey's-heavy cocktail called "Facsimile No Printer" (and a cereal-infused chocolate milk mocktail for their pregnant co-host) before diving into an extensive pop culture roundup. From gushing over Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show and Lady Gaga's timeless talent, to mourning the losses of Catherine O'Hara and James Van Der Beek, the conversation winds through Bridgerton's new season, the horrors of the Epstein files, the absurdity of competitive daycare Valentine's cards, and the glory of "the fuck box" — an autocorrect mishap for the ages. One host also celebrates five weeks on Prozac and feeling hope again, while another attempts a bold cannabis hiatus to wrangle their ADHD.Scriptures: [00:39:32]The episode's main course is a deep dive into the three facsimiles found in the Book of Abraham. The hosts break down what Joseph Smith claimed each facsimile depicted — Abraham's sacrifice, a cosmic map of Kolob and the priesthood, and Abraham teaching astronomy on Pharaoh's throne — versus what Egyptologists have conclusively identified them as: standard Egyptian funerary texts depicting Osiris, Anubis, Isis, and scenes from the Book of Breathing. They highlight the comedic tragedy of Smith filling in missing pieces of damaged papyrus with his own crude drawings, and the fact that the Rosetta Stone was already being decoded around the same time Smith was making his "translations."Church Teachings: [01:00:24]The church's modern response gets a thorough skewering, from the Gospel Topics essay that essentially redefines "translation" to mean divine inspiration rather than actual linguistic work, to Institute manuals that teach the facsimiles as proof of priesthood authority while carefully avoiding any mention of their Egyptian origins. The hosts also explore the "catalyst theory" — the church's fallback position that the papyri merely *inspired* Joseph Smith — and note how foundational Book of Abraham concepts like Kolob and temple ceremonies are to Mormon theology despite being built on thoroughly debunked source material.History: [01:17:00]The episode wraps with a fascinating historical tour of Ptolemaic Egypt, exploring how Greek and Egyptian cultures blended during the era when the Book of Breathing for Hor — the actual document Smith "translated" — was produced. Highlights include the revelation that Books of Breathing were essentially mass-produced funerary Mad Libs with blank spaces for names, the state-engineered creation of the hybrid god Serapis, and the fact that Cleopatra VII was ethnically Greek. The hosts announce a special activity for listeners: a template to draw their own version of the missing pieces of the facsimiles, Joey Smith style.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailMoroni kicked things off with a warm, spicy beverage that matched the theological temperature of the episode: the Naked and Not Ashamed. This hot cocktail combined spiced rum, Porter’s fire whiskey (of course), and dusty apple cider, garnished with cinnamon and a side of celestial sass. It was named for the Adam-and-Eve-just-vibing moment at the end of Abraham 5—before things went full snake oil. The intro spiraled into classic chaos: pickled pico de gallo revelations, impromptu soup grief counseling, a tribute to Catherine O’Hara, and a surprisingly intense breakdown of the man cold-industrial complex.Scriptures: [00:33:01]Claudia dove into Abraham 5 with enough sarcasm to reanimate Joseph’s skull. The segment opened with a well-earned sigh over the Gods’ celestial group project, where “counseled among themselves” is repeated like someone got stuck in a Joseph Smith Mad Lib. Claudia highlighted the total narrative collapse of time: are we planning creation, doing it, recapping it, or just gossiping about it in the break room? Hard to say. The naming of animals got its due as Adam’s big weed-fueled improv bit—naming a cow “Trevor” and a tree “Steve Kevin” while naked and doing the windmill. She also took aim at the absurdity of Adam naming every creature (with gummy-enhanced efficiency, obviously), and the petty divine HR meeting that decided man was too sad alone to function. The rib moment was framed as celestial Build-a-Bear surgery—with a side of CPR through the nostrils. A+ biblical horror comedy.Church Teachings: [00:58:05]aaaAAAaaa tackled the apologetics of Adam’s rib like a scalpel to celestial bone structure. The segment traced how modern LDS leaders (Kimball, Holland, Nelson, etc.) have backtracked the rib narrative into pure symbolism—emphasizing equality, “side-by-side partnership,” and definitely-not-anatomically-incorrect metaphors. She also dug into the gross little detour some 19th-century LDS thinkers took, suggesting Eve was a literal clone made from Adam’s rib marrow (DNA science, but make it horny and spiritually sanctioned masturbation). Then came the Jewish takes, where it turns out “rib” probably meant “side” all along and one Talmudic reading says God just split Adam in half like a cosmic starfish. aaaAAAaaa mourned the missed opportunity of Joseph Smith not adapting the apocrypha (where Lilith and other batshit options live), and eviscerated the cowardice of churches who now retroactively label metaphors only once they’re impossible to defend. Final takeaway: it’s always a metaphor—until it’s not, and then it was a metaphor all along.History: [01:17:48]Abigail delivered a full scorched-earth roast of Orson Scott Card and his aggressively Mormon sci-fi empire. She started with a childhood memory of being way too far into The Memory of Earth before realizing “Nafai” was just Nephi in space drag. Then she walked through the entire Homecoming Saga (aka the Book of Mormon with names run through a Dune generator) including Wetchik (Lehi), Ellemak and Mebaqe (Layman and Lemuel), Zdoreb (Zoram), and the brass-ball Liahona analog. The plot is beat-for-beat BOM, but in space: fleeing Jerusalem/Basilica, building a spaceship/boat, sibling drama, desert wandering, and obedience-as-endgame. She even covered Card’s Tales of Alvin Maker series—Joseph Smith fanfic with magical realism—and then shredded his personal history: homophobic blog posts, canceled Superman scripts, and serving on the board of NOM during Prop 8. The thesis? Card’s work isn’t just Mormon-coded—it’s full-on missionary literature with space suits and patriarchal revenge fantasies. Final punch: “You don’t need him to be evil for the critique to land. But it sure makes it easier.”Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailAbish kicks things off with a cocktail that has absolutely nothing to do with the episode and everything to do with vibes: the "Pickligamy". Equal parts vodka, pickle juice, and lemonade, garnished with a pickle spear, it exists purely because the word sounded funny and honestly? That’s enough. The drink inspires immediate polarization—pickle lovers rejoice, pickle skeptics recoil—and the segment spirals delightfully into pregnancy cravings, candy unboxings, Minneapolis chaos, and the emotional whiplash of trying to stay informed while the world is actively on fire. It’s chaotic, comforting, and extremely on brand.Scriptures: [00:29:53]aaaAAAaaa takes on Abraham 4, aka Genesis 1 but Joseph Smith is freestyling from memory. The segment walks through Abraham 4 beat by beat, highlighting how closely it mirrors Genesis structurally while managing to be longer, clumsier, and way more repetitive. The plural “Gods” are introduced immediately and then aggressively re-introduced over and over again, without ever being explained or allowed to actually do anything interesting.Church Teachings: [00:50:01]Moroni dives into the many Mormon versions of the creation story, moving beyond scripture into temple theology. He lays out the five major creation accounts that matter in LDS thought: Genesis, Moses, Abraham, and multiple versions of the temple endowment—including the pre-2023 version and the revised post-2023 changes. The segment meticulously tracks how the endowment’s creation narrative originally didn’t line up with any of the scriptural versions, then was quietly edited to match them more closely.History: [01:12:43]Abigail closes the episode with “Mormons in Space,” an absolutely unhinged deep dive into Battlestar Galactica (1978) and its creator, Glen A. Larson. What starts as a fun pop-culture tangent turns into a full-blown Mormon theology exposé as Abigail traces Larson’s LDS background, his career trajectory from 1950s boy band heartthrob to TV megacreator, and how Battlestar Galactica becomes Mormon cosmology with lasers.From the Quorum of the Twelve in space, to Kolob-adjacent planets, Egyptian aesthetics, literal devil figures named Lucifer and Iblis, resurrection arcs, sealing language, and angelic beings made of light, the show is revealed to be less “Star Wars knockoff” and more “temple endowment with spaceships.” Abigail walks through key episodes—especially War of the Gods—to show just how explicitly Mormon the narrative becomes, culminating in a celestial destiny for humanity and a literal search for Earth. The segment lands on a comparison between the incoherent, patriarchal original series and the far superior 2004 reboot, proving once again that Mormon ideas are everywhere… even when they really shouldn’t be.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailaaaAAAaaa opens the episode in classic Great & Spacious chaos, immediately acknowledging that Joseph Smith’s Abrahamic space fanfic has once again forced a cocktail concept into existence. This week’s drink, "Gnolaum Kokaubeam", is a coffee cocktail named after the aggressively fake cosmic vocabulary Joseph introduces in Abraham 3—specifically the “eternal” and “star/light” language that somehow sounds like it belongs on a Starbucks menu.The segment veers delightfully into tangents about caffeine, preparation-as-a-lifestyle, accidental recordings, earthquakes, and the inevitability of filling silence with words. The vibe is caffeinated, slightly unhinged, and perfectly aligned with a chapter where God insists—repeatedly and ungrammatically—that He is more intelligent than everyone else.Scriptures: [00:21:17]Moroni walks through Abraham 3, a chapter that functions less like scripture and more like a seventh-grade essay written by a farm school dropout trying very hard to sound cosmically important. Abraham is shown visions of stars, planets, and governing bodies, culminating in the introduction of Kolob—the star nearest to God’s throne—and a hierarchy where everything exists on a scale of “lesser” and “greater,” repeated until meaning collapses under its own weight.The discussion highlights how the chapter blends speculative astronomy, time dilation (“one day unto the Lord”), and premortal hierarchy, all while God declares Himself “more intelligent than they all” in some of the most awkward divine dialogue in scripture. Moroni emphasizes how this chapter quietly introduces foreordination, noble and great ones, and the scaffolding for Mormon premortal elitism, all wrapped in language that feels far more 19th century than ancient.Church Teachings: 00:39:14Claudia breaks down what the LDS Church teaches based on Abraham 3, focusing on foreordination, premortal existence, and the War in Heaven. The segment explores how members are taught that certain spirits were chosen before birth for leadership roles—prophets, rulers, and “choice” individuals—while still maintaining the convenient loophole that foreordination isn’t a guarantee, just a cosmic head start.The conversation unpacks how these teachings historically justified hierarchy, patriarchy, and racism, including older doctrines that framed physical, racial, or national “limitations” as evidence of lesser premortal valiance. Claudia connects these ideas to Mormon culture’s obsession with being the “chosen generation,” noting how every generation somehow inherits that same title, and how the logic of Abraham 3 continues to underpin modern LDS authority structures despite decades of quiet doctrinal cleanup. History: 00:59:24Abigail closes the episode with a deep dive into cosmology itself—what it is, why every human society develops one, and how cosmologies function less as explanations of the universe and more as justifications for who gets to be in charge. Drawing on comparative mythology and religious studies, she outlines common cosmological frameworks across cultures and shows how Mormon cosmology fits neatly into patterns of hierarchy, divine craftsmanship, and procreative authority rather than ancient Hebrew thought.She situates Abraham 3 squarely in its 19th-century context, connecting its ideas to contemporary speculative astronomy, popular religious philosophy, and works like Thomas Dick’s writings that blended science, theology, and social order. The segment makes clear that Mormon cosmology isn’t ancient revelation rediscovered—it’s modern ideology projected backward, embedding patriarchy and authority into the fabric of the universe itself, with Kolob acting less like a star and more like a celestial org chart.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailMoroni opens the episode with a mercifully refreshing cocktail, the Cranberry Vodka Spritz-Ur, a deliciously refreshing drink named for the land of Ur and the general need for something light before wading into Abrahamic theology. Built around vodka, cranberry juice, citrus, and a fizzy topper, the drink does what it needs to do: keeps spirits up while the conversation immediately detours into the emotional exhaustion of existing in 2026. The intro swings between gallows humor, pop-culture side quests, and the general sense that everything is on fire, but at least the drink slaps. Consensus is reached quickly: this is one of the better cocktails in recent memory, which is good, because the rest of the episode is… a lot.Scriptures: [00:32:29]Abish walks everyone through Abraham 2, covering Abraham’s divine relocation order, the expansion of the covenant, and the promise that his name, seed, and priesthood authority will somehow bless literally everyone. The chapter’s emphasis on separation from corrupt societies, obedience without immediate payoff, and covenantal chosenness sets the stage for everything that follows. Abraham is framed as special, chosen, and obedient long before there is any visible success, establishing a template where faithfulness matters more than outcomes. The segment highlights how genealogical language and priesthood authority are already doing a lot of heavy lifting here, even before Joseph Smith gets fully weird with it later.Church Teachings: [00:49:53]aaaAAAaaa attempts to explain the Abrahamic Covenant using an official BYU Religious Studies Center article, quickly discovering that it is aggressively long, deeply repetitive, and determined to explain the same point twelve times in slightly different arrangements of words. After valiantly reading for longer than anyone deserved, he pivots to a summarized version to preserve the will to live of the other hosts. The segment reframes Abraham 2 as institutional theology rather than narrative scripture, showing how the covenant is used to justify chosen-ness, obedience without reward, and suffering as a feature rather than a bug. The takeaway is clear: the covenant isn’t just a promise, it’s an operating system—one that explains why being chosen mostly means being used.History: [01:07:16]Abigail closes things out by focusing on Abraham’s “seed,” and by seed she very much means seed, unpacking just how biologically, genealogically, and obsessively reproductive this section of scripture really is. The segment leans into how lineage becomes theology, how fertility becomes destiny, and how the covenant quietly turns into a divine breeding program with eternal consequences. Along the way, she connects this fixation to broader ancient and modern anxieties about inheritance, legitimacy, and power, all while keeping the tone appropriately unhinged. If nothing else, listeners leave with a renewed appreciation for just how horny theology can get when it runs out of better metaphors.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailAbish opens the episode with the “Osh Kosh Korash”, a chaotic but shockingly drinkable cocktail named after one of Abraham 1’s many extremely real, absolutely-not-made-up gods. Built from chocolate Crown Royal, amaretto, vanilla vodka, coffee liqueur, grenadine, cream, and topped with cherry Dr Pepper, the drink perfectly sets the tone for a chapter that feels like Joseph Smith just kept adding ingredients until something vaguely coherent happened. The intro spirals through pop culture tangents, general apocalypse vibes, and the shared realization that the Book of Abraham somehow manages to be both deeply racist and deeply boring at the same time.Scriptures: [00:24:45]aaaAAAaaa turns Abraham 1 into a full narrator-film trope, with Abraham doing a self-satisfied Emperor’s New Groove–style voiceover while actively being tied to an altar. The segment walks beat-by-beat through Abraham’s humblebrag résumé—his desire for priesthood, knowledge, and greatness—before diving into the sudden appearance of a rotating cast of nonsense gods, Egyptian priests inexplicably operating in Chaldea, and the extremely convenient survival of Abraham while three unnamed virgins die offscreen. The retelling highlights how repetitive, padded, and self-justifying the chapter is, exposing Abraham as a protagonist who treats attempted human sacrifice as a brief inconvenience on his way to cosmic importance.Church Teachings: [00:46:56]Moroni covers what the church teaches about Abraham 1, focusing on how lesson manuals frame Abraham as a model of faith, courage, and righteous ambition in a corrupt world. The segment breaks down the church’s emphasis on Abraham’s desire for priesthood, Pharaoh as a supposedly righteous leader without authority, and the way Abraham’s near-sacrifice is reframed as spiritual proof rather than a narrative disaster. The discussion highlights how the church smooths over the text’s contradictions while quietly leaning on Abraham to justify priesthood lineage, authority claims, and obedience as the ultimate virtue.History: [01:02:04]Abigail closes the episode with a deep dive into 1960s Book of Abraham apologetics, when the papyri resurfaced and forced the church into theological gymnastics. She walks through the rediscovery of the papyri, their identification as standard Egyptian funerary texts, and the resulting scramble to redefine “translation” into something closer to inspiration-by-association. The segment connects these apologetic shifts to broader LDS doctrine, showing how much modern Mormon theology depends on a text that simply does not say what Joseph Smith claimed—and how the church responded when the evidence showed up and refused to cooperate.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailaaaAAAaaa kicks off the first episode of the year with the cocktail "Mintthuselah", a wintery, chocolate-mint apocalypse in a glass named for Methuselah and the general pre-Flood vibe of things being long, old, and overdue for judgment. Using Chocolate Crown Royal, mint chocolate Baileys, a carefully restrained splash of peppermint schnapps, and cream, the drink manages to be both indulgent and ominous—much like Moses 8 itself. The intro meanders through sandwich betrayal, bad brains, naming talents, and a surprising amount of pop culture detours, before finally landing on the idea that if the world is ending via flood, it should at least taste good while it happens.Sciptures: [00:27:37]Moroni takes on Moses 8 and quickly realizes there isn’t much there there. The chapter is mostly lineage, absurd lifespans, and a heavy-handed declaration that everyone is wicked, with very little actual Noah content and almost no flood logistics compared to Genesis. Instead of ark specs or animal gathering, the text leans hard into sermonizing, random giant mentions, and premature name-dropping of Jesus Christ thousands of years before that would make any sense. The segment highlights how abruptly the book ends, how little narrative payoff exists, and how Joseph Smith’s retelling feels more like a theological rant than a story—culminating in God threatening to wipe everyone out and then immediately moving on like nothing happened.Church Teachings: [00:48:10]Abish unpacks how Moses 8 gets weaponized in LDS doctrine, focusing especially on the “sons of God” versus “daughters of men” framework and how it’s been used to justify fear around mixed-faith and interracial marriages. Tracing teachings from Brigham Young through Spencer W. Kimball, Harold B. Lee, Mark E. Petersen, and Ezra Taft Benson, the segment shows how marriage outside the covenant has long been framed as spiritually dangerous, socially corrosive, and even deserving of divine punishment. The discussion pulls no punches, highlighting explicit racist quotes, the church’s refusal to fully disavow them, and the ongoing cultural pressure that treats non-member spouses as liabilities rather than partners—all while pointing out how hollow the modern “love everyone” messaging sounds when eternal exclusion is still baked into the doctrine.History: [01:16:37]Abigail zooms out from Mormon scripture to place Moses 8 in its broader mythological context, walking through flood stories across cultures and civilizations. From Mesopotamian epics to global flood myths, the segment explores why floods show up so frequently in ancient storytelling and how they’re typically about chaos, renewal, and survival—not doctrinal purity. By contrast, Moses 8 stands out for how little it cares about the flood itself and how focused it is on punishment, lineage, and obedience. The result is a clear historical gut check: Joseph Smith didn’t expand the Noah story so much as flatten it into a morality lecture, stripping away the mythic weight and replacing it with a warning about not listening to the prophet.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailMoroni opens the episode with The Flood Line, a blackberry Crown Royal and ginger ale cocktail that hits hard, pops loud, and sets the tone for a night that’s equal parts chaos and critique. The drink name riffs on Moses 7’s apocalyptic vibes, while the intro spirals delightfully through Costco Jesus art, pop-culture detours, and the usual GASP blend of reverence and profanity. The overall energy is loose, a little unhinged, and perfectly primed for talking about prophets who allegedly rearranged geology.Scriptures: [00:32:04]Abish tackles Moses 7, comparing the sparse biblical Enoch to the fully weaponized Mormon version who preaches, builds Zion, reroutes rivers, and makes mountains flee like startled pets. She walks through the LDS expansion of Enoch’s story—Zion as a literal utopia, God openly weeping, and a city so righteous it gets yoinked into heaven—then contrasts it with both the Bible’s two-sentence shrug and the apocryphal Enoch who acts more like a cosmic archivist than a social reformer. The segment frames Joseph Smith’s Enoch as less ancient prophet and more ideological prototype for Mormon communal theology.Church Teachings: [01:02:17]aaaAAAaaa digs into literalism as a defining and increasingly fragile pillar of Mormon theology, using Moses 7’s “mountains fleeing” as the launch point. Pulling from scripture, JST Genesis, Ensign articles, FAIR apologetics, and conference talks, the segment shows how early and modern leaders framed priesthood power as genuinely world-altering—breaking mountains, dividing seas—while later scholarship quietly reframes that power as symbolic or institutional once evidence fails to cooperate. The result is a sharp exploration of how literal claims are taught with confidence, then softened, spiritualized, or quietly retired when reality refuses to play along.History: [01:38:39]Abigail returns for what is jokingly labeled “part four of three” in her Satanic Panic series, tracing how fear-based moral hysteria deepened and spread the more she researched it. This installment situates Mormon culture as uniquely primed for panic—steeped in literal belief, supernatural causality, and rigid authority structures—making members especially vulnerable to conspiracy thinking. The segment underscores how the same literalism that props up prophetic mountain-moving also fuels real-world harm when paranoia is treated as revelation.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailAbish opens the episode with the “Skibidi-lestial”, a shockingly good tangerine-vanilla-Malibu-UV-blue-floral cocktail that began life as a joke and somehow achieved exaltation. The intro spirals delightfully through drink lore, abandoned gardens, generational slang anxiety, Barnabas’s failed cocktail redemption arc, and pop-culture tangents ranging from Avatar nipples to Hallmark movie crimes, all while firmly establishing the night’s tone as cozy, chaotic, and spiritually unserious.Scriptures: [00:32:43]aaaAAAaaa tackles Moses 6 through aggressive “Pearl Math,” walking through the overlapping lifespans of Adam’s descendants and landing on the central absurdity: a tiny, fully interrelated monoculture where Adam and multiple patriarchs are still alive, God is still showing up, and yet missionary work is somehow necessary. The segment roasts the anachronistic theology (atonement before Jesus exists, baptism before doctrine), the psychedelic clay-on-the-eyes seer upgrade, and Adam being “quickened in the inner man,” ultimately arguing that the chapter only makes sense as Joseph Smith projecting 19th-century Mormonism backward into Bible fanfic.Church Teachings: [01:00:43]Special guest Laman shares his mission experiences and the process of disentangling Mormon doctrine from identity after leaving the church, offering a grounded look at how missionary culture, obedience, and certainty shape members long after belief cracks. The discussion explores why ex-Mormons keep talking about Mormonism, how doubt is culturally framed as failure, and how walking away often requires rebuilding not just theology, but an entire sense of self.History: [02:06:29]Abigail continues her multi-part series on the Satanic Panic, showing how Mormon cultural patterns — authority worship, fear of hidden evil, and obsession with moral purity — made the church uniquely susceptible to the hysteria. This installment connects early LDS ideas about secret combinations and Satanic influence to the broader American panic, setting the stage for how these narratives escalated and why they landed so effectively in Mormon communities.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailaaaAAAaaa walked into this episode like a man determined to prove that rock bottom is not a location but a state of cocktail consciousness. Thus was born "The Rejected Offering" a hotdog martini that immediately triggered a collective, visceral “oh no” from everyone present. Built from ketchup, spicy brown mustard, muddled relish brine, lemon juice, vodka, and a hefeweizen float “for bread,” this drink was essentially a liquid Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest. Garnished with teeny weenies, it was more an act of performance art than a beverage. And of course, when the others revolted after their first sips, aaaAAAaaa — like Cain, but with a higher tolerance — drank all three.Scriptures: [00:33:37]Moroni took us through Moses 5, the moment the family of Adam graduates from “naked gardening” to “institutionalized murder and cult formation.” Using the Pearl of Great Price remix of Genesis — the version God allegedly showed Moses through a burning 19th-century VR headset — Moroni highlighted just how much of this chapter gets repurposed verbatim in the LDS temple endowment. The angel explaining sacrifice? The law-of-sacrifice phrasing? Eve’s “Wherefore, we rejoice…” line? Yep — straight from Moses 5.We get the classic beats: Adam tills, Eve “also labors with him” (the scriptural equivalent of saying “she helped”), everyone starts having kids with everyone else, and suddenly Cain and Abel exist to reenact the world's first true-crime documentary. Moroni walked through Cain’s floor-fruit offering versus Abel’s blood sacrifice, God’s weird favoritism, and Cain’s bisexual-coded “Who is the Lord that I should know him?” before the inevitable rock-to-head fratricide. By the end, God curses Cain, darkness spreads, and the entire human family structure starts looking like a closed-circle Utah genealogy chart.Church Teachings: [00:55:31]Abish pulled apart how LDS doctrine diverges sharply from Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and Islamic readings of Cain and Abel. Instead of the usual ambiguity about why Cain’s offering failed, Mormonism declares — with the certainty of a bishop who’s never read any other scripture — that Cain lacked faith, lacked sincerity, lacked righteousness, and possibly lacked good produce. Other traditions debate symbolism; Mormonism insists it was an obedience test with Jesus foreshadowing baked in.She outlined the uniquely Mormon additions: Satan personally tutors Cain in Evil 101, the introduction of Master Mahan as the prototype of all future “secret combinations,” and the idea that organized global evil can be traced directly to Cain’s LinkedIn job title. Abish also highlighted how LDS materials have canonized Cain’s curse, his “mark,” and his role as the template for apostasy itself. And then, because this is GASP, she delivered the pièce de résistance: Master Mahan as a Joe Smith original, referenced twice in scripture and then never again, like a catchphrase from a failed 1830s sitcom.History: [01:18:20]Abigail kicked off a multi-week descent into the Satanic Panic, starting with the cultural soup of the 60s–80s: horror movies, the rise of the Religious Right, pop psychology’s obsession with “unlocking your inner trauma,” and the widespread misuse of hypnosis by therapists who should absolutely not have been allowed to possess clipboards.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailWhat started as a pie night turned into aaaAAAaaa dragging Abigail and Moroni into a full musical fever-dream about 90s Mormon Thanksgiving. We made a whole-ass AI musical — 15 original songs — and reacted to it live together like a group memory séance. Expect missionaries breaking rules in the basement, an operatic Jell-O salad declaration, the Second Coming of dessert, and the world’s longest prayer set to music. We laugh, wince, bond, and eventually crash back into the present… where we realize everyone went home and we’re the adults stuck cleaning. This may be the most unhinged, nostalgic, and heartfelt episode we’ve ever done.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailIntro Moroni kicked things off this week with a drink that was equal parts chaotic and on-brand. He walked us through his creation, the “Fig Leaf Martini”, a cocktail whose theological accuracy is at least as questionable as its citrus content. The intro drifted through pop-culture tangents, general unruliness, and all the normal pre-scripture mayhem that happens when he’s at the wheel — literally this time, since he recorded on the road.Scriptures: [00:34:56] Abish took us into Moses 4, and she did not hold back. She went line by line through the “Fall of Adam and Eve” narrative, but with the emotional realness that the text itself refuses to allow. She spent most of the segment interrogating how the church frames Satan’s access to the garden, God’s voyeuristic “Where art thou?” routine, Adam’s blame-shifting, Eve’s eternal PR disaster, and the downright bizarre sewing-fig-leaves-with-vines situation. She also brought receipts detailing just how incoherent, contradictory, and unresolvable modern LDS doctrine is on literally every part of this chapter. It was half theology deep-dive, half roast session, and fully unhinged in the best way.Church Teachings: [01:04:56] aaaAAAaaa decided to outsource his entire segment this week by reading a Q&A he had previously done with ChatGPT about Moses 4. What followed was one of the funniest “official-ish doctrine” breakdowns we’ve had yet. He hit everything: whether the Fall was scheduled, why the church retroactively calls Eve heroic while still throwing her under the cosmic bus, whether God is just a divine Peeping Tom spying on naked people who don’t know what naked is, and how the church squares Satan entering Eden through a snake door. It was chaotic, deeply doctrinal, and ended up revealing just how much of LDS theology is an ever-shifting patch job held together by vibes, correlation, and selective memory. History: [01:27:11] Abigail wrapped up the episode with the full cultural, political, and cinematic history of Satan — not the theological being, but the American invention. She traced how Cold War paranoia, the Manson murders, the rise of serial killers, the birth of the religious right, televangelists like Falwell and Robertson, and movies like Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen combined to manufacture the Satanic Panic pipeline. She walked us through how Mormonism, eager for social legitimacy in the 60s and 70s, grabbed onto evangelical “spiritual warfare” rhetoric and never let go. By the end, Satan had gone from ancient adversary to full-blown American pop icon, political boogeyman, and Relief Society cautionary tale. It was a tour through fear, folklore, mass media, and the uniquely American tendency to blame the devil for everything from feminism to disco.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailAbish brings in The Fall, a cranberry-ginger-pomegranate-gin concoction anchored by Trader Joe’s seasonal soda and garnished with pomegranate seeds as a nod to the “forbidden fruit.” The gang immediately veers into a full dissertation on Trader Joe’s plants, tiny grocery aisles, ginger snaps, and then somehow a 20-minute side-quest about Lagoon ride safety (or lack thereof). It is peak “welcome to the podcast, we’ve missed chaos.”Scriptures: [00:24:16] aaaAAAaaa takes Moses 3 and turns it into a deranged sci-fi lab log written by Dr. E. Lohim, creator of “living meat prototypes.” Adam becomes a beta-tested dirt man given CPR, Eve is printed from a rib in a 3D-bioprinter, and the garden is essentially an overfunded tech demo with terrible UX. The team spirals into bits about Adam trying to fuck every animal, God being forced to make Eve because Adam was an annoying “hey dad hey dad hey dad” only child, and the Hebrew behind “help meet” actually meaning an equal— something millennia of men conveniently edited out. It’s equal parts theology, parody, linguistic correction, and unhinged improv.Church Teachings: [00:41:11] Special guest Claudia dives into men’s mental health and how the church frames it—namely, that men are expected to be stoic, preside, provide, and repress every human emotion until it leaks out as a midlife crisis, a podcast, or a Toyota Tacoma. She breaks down the church’s gender expectations, the false dichotomy of “priesthood = strength, womanhood = nurturing,” and how harmful the “men don’t need emotional support” narrative really is. The crew riffs on cultural conditioning, therapy avoidance, and how Mormonism treats emotional vulnerability in men like a contagious sin. It’s shockingly tender, deeply real, and still full of jokes.History: [01:19:29] Abigail covers Harold B. Lee, president, bureaucratic fanatic, and one of Mormonism’s top contenders for “Least Fun Man in History.” She traces his Idaho upbringing, his obsession with discipline and order, his meteoric rise through church admin roles, and how he essentially architected correlation—centralized control disguised as spiritual efficiency. Abigail quotes some of his most cringe-inducing lines about women, obedience, and domestic hierarchy, and pairs them with her own early-marriage horror stories to show just how deeply his ideology soaked into Mormon culture. It’s part biography, part feminist takedown, part comedy roast—classic Abigail.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailaaaAAAaaa kicks off with Let There Be Lime, a bright, creamy gin-based drink with lime juice, coconut cream, and a float of blue curaçao that looks “like the firmament if God had a tiki phase.” It’s equal parts creation myth and vacation cocktail—light, tart, and spiritually confusing. Between sips, the crew detours into Trader Joe’s cheese obsessions, Halloween charcuterie feats (“the meat hand”), and a long tangent about the economics of SNAP benefits that somehow circles back to cheese again. By the time anyone remembers they’re supposed to talk scripture, everyone’s already half-drunk and defending kale as if it’s theology.Scriptures: [00:26:43]Moroni covers Moses 2, Joseph Smith’s fanfic rewrite of Genesis. He performs it as a full-blown comedy sketch, with “Ancient Chats with Moses” hosted by God Almighty himself. Together, God and Moses walk through creation like a chaotic divine podcast: day one light mode, day two plumbing the firmament, day three inventing kale “to keep people humble,” and day six “beta testing humans.” The hosts argue about the physics of light existing before the sun, roast the logic of creating mosquitoes, and crown day seven “brunch day.” The moral? God invented gays so they could invent brunch.Church Teachings: [00:45:20]Abish dives into the church’s official take on creation and how much of it hinges on “order, obedience, and divinely appointed gender roles.” She walks through a church lesson that tries to marry literal creationism with modern science, calling it “a theological hostage negotiation.” The group debates why Mormon God micromanages planets like a middle manager at a failing startup, how “six days” somehow equals “six creative periods,” and how members are still expected to treat both evolution and the six-day creation as equally true. It’s the usual mix of reverence and rage—with sidebars on BYU professors, temple endowment parallels, and how women are expected to “create life” while men “create podcasts.”History: [01:22:54]Abigail returns with another prophet bio—this time Joseph Fielding Smith, the ultimate fun-hater of Mormonism. She kicks off the segment mid–Taco Bell Baja Blast cream pie taste test (verdict: “it’s like key lime pie, but with a hint of dew”) before diving into the century-long life of the man who hated evolution more than Satan himself. Born in 1876 and made an apostle by his father in 1910, Smith spent fifty years as church historian—basically in charge of gaslighting the entire religion into consistency. Abigail reads his wildest quotes: evolution “is as false as its author who reigns in hell,” and “a man who believes in evolution has no right to teach in the church.” She skewers his books Man, His Origin and Destiny (“Darwin is a fugly slut”) and The Way to Perfection (“Mormon Doctrine, but make it racist”), tracing how his anti-science tantrums still ripple through LDS culture today.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailThe gang is back from hiatus, a little crusty but ready to dive into The Pearl of Great Price. Moroni kicks things off with the Son of God Sour, a divine little mix of bourbon, amaretto, lemon juice, and honey (or simple syrup, if you fear God less). The drink is meant to “know its divine worth,” which it does—bold, sweet, and just a little tart, much like the hosts themselves. The crew then recaps their cursed break: Abish’s nightmare Disney trip, Abigail’s and aaaAAAaaa’s southern misadventures at a vow renewal and pole-dancing class, and Moroni’s Ohio rollercoaster’s both literal and emotional. It’s a fittingly unhinged welcome back to the scriptures.Scriptures: [00:54:19]Abish breaks down Moses 1 and the cosmic fever dream that is Joseph Smith’s “translation” of Genesis. Set in 1830, Joseph’s new baby church is barely two months old when he decides to write a prequel to the Bible—because, apparently, God needed a director’s cut. The revelation introduces a God who creates “worlds without number,” tells Moses “you are my son,” and lets him see all creation in a dramatic lightshow. Moses promptly faints like a Victorian lady, wakes up to find Satan asking for worship, and tells him to piss off. Abish walks us through how this text flips Calvinist theology on its head: instead of depraved worms begging for grace, humanity is divine—“ants with potential,” as she puts it. The crew jokes about Moses as God’s exhausted intern, Satan as an emo theater kid, and Joseph Smith’s flair for turning blasphemy into branding.Church Teachings: [01:13:20]aaaAAAaaa digs into what the church officially says about Moses 1 and the Pearl of Great Price, pulling from an online church lesson manual. The emphasis is on “divine identity”—that all people are literal children of God—which the church manages to make simultaneously comforting and hierarchical. They discuss how this concept feeds into Mormon exceptionalism (“you’re divine, but only our kind of divine”) and the endless pressure to be godlike by next Tuesday. The conversation spirals into musings about eternal potential, weird church art depicting pre-mortal Moses, and whether “divine identity” still counts if you’re late on tithing.History: [01:43:57]Abigail takes us on a wild, bird-filled tangent before diving into the history of the Pearl of Great Price . Between discussions of ravens, ducks, and horrifying bird anatomy, she explains how this grab-bag scripture came to be. Originally compiled in 1851 by Apostle Franklin D. Richards in Liverpool, the Pearl was a scrapbook of Joseph’s “miscellaneous bullshit”—snippets of the Book of Moses, the Book of Abraham, a few hymns, and leftover revelations stapled together for British converts. Orson Pratt later padded it with fragments from the RLDS archives, and by 1880 it was canonized—essentially turning Joseph’s napkin doodles into holy writ. Abigail calls it “the bottom of the Mormon purse,” full of gum wrappers, half-translations, and divine side quests. She caps it off by gleefully pointing out all the things left out of the canon—Joseph’s most chaotic edits, contradictions, and hallucinations that even 19th-century Mormons thought were too weird.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailIn today's episode Abigail, aaaAAAaaa, and special guest Lem discuss Denver Snuffer, and Lem tells all about their experience in that offshoot of the church. Also, they are all super baked. So, there are definitely tangents about things ranging from Mark Hofmann to probably less mormon adjacent things.Enjoy, and we will be back with The Pearl of Great Price and the beginning of season 3 next Sunday!Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailTo commemorate finally escaping the swamp of the Doctrine & Covenants, Abish mixed up The Pearl of Great Peach (or Peach of Great Peach, depending on which name makes you laugh harder). It’s a fizzy peach-and-raspberry concoction topped with champagne and Chambord, garnished with peach slices, and best enjoyed while shouting “never again” at the bound copy of the D&C on your shelf . The crew also celebrated with a rowdy D&C trivia drinking game, where every wrong answer meant drinks—and every answer that was “Joseph Smith” meant everyone had to drink.Scriptures: [00:39:23]aaaAAAaaa tackled Section 138, Joseph F. Smith’s vision of the spirit world, and turned it into a fever-dream monologue. Instead of reverent scripture, listeners got a full-blown parody of Spirit Prison as a seminary classroom with eternal fluorescent lights, folding chairs multiplying like locusts, and missionary lessons that never end. Jesus shows up with a clipboard, Adam holds his scriptures upside down, Isaiah mutters hashtags, and the vending machines only dispense Bit-O-Honey and warm Sprite. The moral? Missionary work is eternal, naps are holy, and warm milk is cursed.Church Teachings: [00:55:15]Moroni dove into the many changes made to the D&C over the years. From Joseph’s 1833 Book of Commandments (cut short by mob violence), to Orson Pratt’s 1876 overhaul that added plural marriage (and dropped the monogamy section, wink wink), to the 2013 edition’s grammar clean-up, Moroni laid out how “continuing revelation” basically means “God changed his mind again.” Along the way, the hosts riffed on how the church votes on canon like it’s a bad HOA meeting, joked about Joseph’s endless pseudonyms, and noted how “doctrinal confusion” magically disappears when the PR department says so.History: [01:11:48]Instead of history, Abigail read a “Dear Abby” letter from listener, and former guest host, Eliza who wrote about feeling abandoned by God, suffocated by church teachings, and unsure what to do with mounting doubts. Abigail responded with compassion, validation, and a good dose of practical advice: you don’t have to cling to institutions that harm you, you’re not broken for asking hard questions, and joy is worth chasing outside the church. It was the perfect way to end the D&C slog—closing not with Joseph Smith’s nonsense, but with real human honesty from the community.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailHey everyone,This week Abigail and aaaAAAaaa had to make a last minute trip to Denver. So, they took the recording equipment and convinced their niece and her friend to be Mile High On The Mountain Top.Enjoy this rousing conversation about so many different things, and some of them were related to Mormons.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailMoroni brings us Alvin’s Afterlife Amaretto Amalgamation, a cocktail built on two shots of Amaretto, Porter's Peach whiskey, lemon juice, orange bitters, simple syrup, and topped with soda water. It’s sweet, a little cough-syrupy if you don’t stir it right, and surprisingly tasty once balanced out. The name comes from D&C 137, where Joseph Smith has a vision of his brother Alvin in the celestial kingdom.Scriptures: [00:24:31] Abish covers D&C 136 and 137. Section 136 comes from Brigham Young in 1847 at Winter Quarters, when the Saints were freezing, starving, and watching their neighbors drop dead in droves. God (conveniently through Brigham) commands the Saints to organize into neat little companies with captains, share provisions, repent fast, and stop swearing about their oxen dying. Zion, the revelation insists, isn’t just a destination but the “friends we made along the way”—with a side of martyrdom PR for Joseph and Hyrum. Section 137 rewinds to an 1836 vision Joseph had in the Kirtland Temple, where he saw Alvin chilling in the celestial kingdom despite never being baptized. This cracked open the doctrine of proxy ordinances and baptisms for the dead. Abish points out how much of this section was retroactively cobbled together from Joseph’s diary and later scribes, making it less a prophecy and more a posthumous PR edit.Church Teachings: [00:44:17] aaaAAAaaa decides to “take it easy” on the team by running a text-based RPG called Choose Your Salvation: A Zion Text Adventure. Spoiler: no one actually had fun. Set at Winter Quarters, the game required everyone to make “righteous” choices—obeying captains, singing “Come, Come Ye Saints,” testifying to doubters, reaffirming the Twelve, redistributing flour, and bearing witness that Zion will be redeemed. Wrong answers resulted in losing toes, getting crushed under Relief Society bonnets, or dying of poor planning. Eventually, the party “dies,” only to be resurrected into a Spirit World expansion pack, where Alvin waves from a celestial loveseat and a glowing receptionist angel chirps through onboarding. The whole thing is chaotic, hilarious, and a pitch-perfect parody of Mormon gamified obedience.History: [01:05:05] Abigail introduces us to one of the strangest fundamentalist spin-offs yet: The Righteous Branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Founded by Gerald Peterson Sr. after the assassination of Rulon Allred in 1977, Peterson claimed Allred’s ghost (fresh off the murder scene) laid hands on his head, healed his back pain, and ordained him “the one mighty and strong.” Soon after, he doubled down with appearances from Adam-God, Joseph Smith, Jesus, and basically the whole celestial Avengers lineup. With divine backing secured, he launched his own sect in literal nowhere—Modena, Utah (population ~15). Abigail details their tiny temples (trailers with baptismal fonts), leadership mirroring Salt Lake’s structure, and bizarre relocation to a Nevada outpost near the world-famous Clown Motel. She spices it up with tangents on ghost chiropractors, spiritual Coachella, Mormon Hydra schisms, and the surreal spectacle of this ghost town church trying to play dress-up as Zion.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailAbish introduces the cocktail The Fallen Prophet, a doomed experiment built around the cursed A&W Ice Cream Sundae Root Beer. On its own, the soda tastes like carbonated HoHos, so she tried to redeem it by mixing in regular root beer, then dropping in two shots—Bailey’s and a coffee liqueur. The result? A curdled monstrosity she dubbed root beer cheese. It’s appropriately revolting for an episode marking Joseph Smith’s death, and a fitting tribute to a man whose own concoctions often turned rancid.Scriptures: [00:30:59]aaaAAAaaa braves the word salad of D&C 134 and 135. Section 134, a declaration on government, is the church’s attempt to look respectable in 1835 by affirming loyalty to laws—while quietly ignoring all the times the Saints ignored laws, flouted government, or ran from the cops. It’s a mix of lofty ideals about liberty and conscience, undercut by real-life hypocrisy (like Utah’s modern theocracy-lite politics). Then section 135 recounts Joseph Smith’s martyrdom at Carthage. The official version paints him as second only to Jesus, conveniently omitting the polygamy, fraud, and violence that got him there. aaaAAAaaa delivers it all with exasperated snark, pointing out how quickly the text slides into hagiography.Church Teachings: [00:51:15]Moroni takes D&C 134 and runs it against the church’s actual record, exposing contradiction after contradiction. Supposedly governments are ordained of God to protect life and liberty, but Utah legislators with temple recommends keep meddling in laws—weakening protections for sex crimes, pushing anti-marriage equality measures, rewriting medical marijuana bills, and literally enforcing “Zion curtains” in restaurants. The section’s ideal that religion should never infringe on others’ rights is shown to be laughable, given the church’s ongoing interference in civil law and politics. It’s less “follow the laws of man” and more “follow the laws, unless they’re inconvenient for us.”History: [01:31:32]Abigail takes us into the mountain—literally—with the story of the Granite Mountain Records Vault. Built in the 1960s, the vault is the church’s apocalyptic filing cabinet, blasting a hole into solid granite in Little Cottonwood Canyon to preserve genealogical microfilms. Excavated with fertilizer bombs and diesel, the vault was constructed to withstand earthquakes, nuclear blasts, and possibly Jesus himself demanding everyone’s family tree at the Second Coming. Abigail mixes in geology nerdery, Utah construction gossip, and tangents about bell-ringing to befriend doves, quack-dish slang, and raccoon food experiments . It’s half Cold War paranoia, half Mormon control-freak energy, and all delightfully weird.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailaaaAAAaaa mixes up the Spiritual Babylon—a chaotic purple concoction of red wine, blue Gatorade, sparkling water, and lime juice. It’s as irreverent as its name, embodying the apocalyptic party vibe of Joseph’s “flee Babylon” rants. The crew spirals into tangents about cursed sodas, root beer theology, and which modern beverage most deserves divine wrath.Scriptures: [00:20:12] Moroni takes on D&C 133, the appendix that overstayed its welcome. This revelation is essentially Joseph Smith running a second lap around the apocalypse track: Saints must leave Babylon, continents are prophesied to squish back into Pangea, and Christ arrives drenched in grape blood, stomping the nations like a cosmic vintner. The lost tribes get teased again (hidden in the north? hollow earth? still waiting). Moroni notes how this reads less like scripture and more like a Michael Bay script—complete with fire, earthquakes, and zombie ancestors showing up for one last sealing session.Church Teachings: [00:39:36] Abish dives into how the church spins D&C 133 into missionary zeal, pulling on its “preach to all the world” threads. From the mission call “inspiration” lottery, to the infamous white handbook (aka the white Bible), to the lived realities of missionary danger—injuries, accidents, violence, and the bizarre “manacled Mormon” scandal—the segment unpacks the culty control mechanisms in missions. She also covers modern shifts like online-only missions, turning proselytizing into a call-center hustle. It’s equal parts tragic, absurd, and all-too-real.History: [01:18:06] Abigail dives deep into the Lafferty family, the Provo clan made infamous in Under the Banner of Heaven. Outwardly picture-perfect—strict patriarch, many kids, Eagle Scouts, mission service—but inside: abuse, control, and eventual radicalization. Ron and Dan Lafferty declared themselves prophets, set up a School of the Prophets, and produced a so-called “removal revelation” that ordered the deaths of Brenda Lafferty and her infant daughter. Abigail walks through how toxic patriarchy, fundamentalism, and fragile masculinity fused into a murderous ideology. It’s a harrowing look at how Mormon theology, when pushed to extremes, bleeds into violence.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailMoroni starts things off with "Sealed for Eternibubbly", a light and deceptively charming cocktail made with vodka, elderflower liqueur, fresh lemon juice, simple syrup, and sparkling rosé. It’s crisp, celebratory, and just fancy enough to distract from the fact that D&C 132 is basically the celestial prenup you didn’t sign. The segment serves as a bubbly prelude to one of the most infamous revelations in LDS history.Scriptures: [00:24:25]Claudia takes us through D&C 132, the church’s original and still-most-awkward revelation on plural marriage. Presented as a divine manifesto, the section is part theology, part legal contract, and part Joseph Smith desperately seeking God’s stamp of approval for his extramarital hobbies. Eternal marriage is framed as the key to godhood, but there’s a catch—women are property, adultery is redefined to benefit men, and “destroyed” is God’s favorite threat. Claudia navigates the tangled verses, pointing out the conditional promises, blatant double standards, and the overall vibe of a man trying way too hard to make “God told me to” sound respectable.Church Teachings: [00:59:12]aaaAAAaaa breaks down how the church currently frames D&C 132 and plural marriage, from “it was a commandment then but not now” to “we still believe in it eternally, just not in this life… unless you’re a widower.” He threads in the ways official statements dance around the section’s original intent, how leaders talk about “restoration” while quietly scrubbing the messier parts from manuals, and how modern apologetics work to make Joseph’s behavior sound palatable. For some reason, he slides into an accidental British accent, which somehow makes the whole discussion feel even more absurd—Downton Abbey, but with more sealing rooms.History: [01:26:37]Abigail zooms out to explore the broader history of polygyny, tracing it from its biblical roots through the LDS introduction and eventual institutional abandonment (at least publicly). She covers how polygyny has functioned as a tool of control in various cultures, the theological gymnastics used to justify it, and its ongoing presence in Mormon fundamentalist movements. The segment makes clear that while the church officially left plural marriage behind in 1890, its doctrinal ghost still haunts Latter-day Saint theology and culture.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailAbish opens the episode with a triple threat of chaos: three different shots, each one progressively more unhinged than the last. The Devil Went Down to Susquehanna is a fiery nod to Joseph’s early river baptism days. Keys to the Kingdom hits like a priesthood ordination gone wrong. And The Voice from the Heavens? Let’s just say it leaves you speaking in tongues—or maybe slurring them. Fueled by this liquid sacrament, the hosts dive into an awards-show-style game complete with categories like Most Unhinged Utah Baby Name, Best Girls Camp MLM Pitch, and Best Mormon Loophole Sex Position. It’s a red carpet event for Mormon absurdity.Scriptures: [00:37:38]aaaAAAaaa takes us through D&C 128–131 and reads three of them straight because these sections are self-parody at this point. Section 128 is Joseph Smith’s attic-era magnum opus: an over-the-top epistle introducing baptisms for the dead, with a side of heavenly red tape and the Book of Mormon’s first Latin flex. It’s part travelogue, part musical number, part legal notice to all of heaven. We get rivers, mountains, angels, choirs of the dead, and enough dramatic imagery to fill a Broadway stage. Sections 129–131 keep the weird going, from secret handshakes to tell angels from demons, to the idea that resurrected beings have bodies but spirits don’t (don’t overthink it), to celestial marriage being the ultimate graduation ceremony. The takeaway? Joe’s in hiding but his imagination is running wild.Church Teachings: [01:07:22]The church teachings segment leans into the theological aftermath of these sections—how the LDS Church today frames baptisms for the dead, temple ordinances, and that obsession with keys (spiritual and otherwise). We also get into the church’s obsession with authority and ritual correctness, and how every “key” seems to come with a new set of rules, requirements, and reasons for why you’re probably doing it wrong. It’s a masterclass in how an attic epistle became a multi-billion-dollar temple construction program.History: [01:23:20]Abigail continues her Fundie Files series with part two of the Jeffs saga. This chapter finishes the rise of Rulon Jeffs, patriarch of the FLDS dynasty. Rulon’s leadership style combined authoritarian control with prolific polygamy, solidifying a hierarchy that placed him as both prophet and family overlord. Abigail unpacks how this groundwork allowed his successor, Warren Jeffs, to centralize even more power, turning the church into a near-totalitarian cult. The road to Warren’s reign is paved with manipulation, religious absolutism, and, frankly, some of the creepiest family dynamics in Mormon fundamentalism.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailaaaAAAaaa serves up the Epistle Fizz, a bubbly concoction for the prophet on the run. Inspired by Joseph Smith’s hiding-in-the-attic-era letter-writing spree, this champagne-based drink has the spiritual energy of a brunch prophet dictating ordinances in exile. The segment spirals gloriously, covering everything from champagne economics to Chuck Mangione’s devastating backstory, with a side of ✨ trauma fizz ✨. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll maybe start a new dispensation in a crawlspace.Scriptures: [00:33:55]Moroni makes his glorious return—now remote, but still Moroni as hell. He walks us through D&C 125–127, where Joseph Smith is ducking the law and trying to micromanage Zion from a secret attic. The Saints are told to settle Zarahemla, Iowa (yes, that’s real), while Brigham Young finally gets permission to go home and maybe do laundry. We also get the first formal mention of baptism for the dead, which Joseph introduces like, “Oh hey, this is a totally normal thing now.” All of it comes in the form of letters dictated like scripture from the world’s most paranoid Airbnb tenant. There’s bureaucracy, veiled threats, and a healthy dose of delusional optimism. Just another Tuesday in Restoration land.Church Teachings: [00:49:54]Abish explores the church’s weird, codependent relationship with suffering. Why do Mormons treat hardship like a virtue? Why is enduring pain seen as proof of righteousness? In this segment, she breaks down how Church rhetoric has long framed suffering as spiritually productive—even desirable. Drawing on talks, manuals, and vibes, she critiques this theology of martyrdom and offers an alternative that doesn’t involve being gaslit by the Plan of Salvation. Saints deserve joy, not just refined anguish.History: [01:31:40]Abigail opens the Jeffs chapter of her fundamentalism series, and buckle up—it’s only getting darker from here. We begin with Rulon Jeffs, a fundie leader who systematized polygamy and spiritual authoritarianism, marrying dozens of women—including his own stepmothers—and grooming the path for his even creepier son, Warren. This segment unpacks the rise of the FLDS’s power structure and how Rulon’s death opened the door to Warren’s cultish reign of terror. It’s a sobering deep dive into the prophetic succession that turned fringe theology into institutionalized abuse.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailaaaAAAaaa opens the episode with a drink that pairs just as well with exhaustion as it does with divine real estate plans. The "Weary Traveler" is built from Five Wives Tamarind vodka, 1 oz pineapple juice, 0.5 oz of lemon juice, 0.5 oz of simple syrup, and 0.5 oz of Chambord, but the real secret ingredient is that you can just pour and pray those ingredients together and it still tastes amazing. As the name suggests, it’s a tribute to the Saints being given an assignment by the Almighty to build a boutique hotel for said weary traveler. Also discussed: the origin of branding in Mormonism, pioneer fatigue, and whether celestial inns come with continental breakfast.Scriptures: [00:24:58] Abish takes the wheel for D&C 124, set in the early Nauvoo period. God’s newest revelation reads like a holy Google Doc—detailed instructions for building a temple, a boarding house, and a divine leadership org chart. The Nauvoo House, essentially God’s Airbnb for VIP guests, is to be funded by Saints who just barely survived Missouri. And the temple? It’s the big one—where God promises to reveal the “fullness of the priesthood,” which definitely doesn’t sound like a secret society if you say it real fast. Joseph gets busy handing out divine callings, committee assignments, and redemption arcs to all his friends (and future traitors), including Brigham, Hyrum, and the ever-slutty John C. Bennett. It's both a revelation and a resume-building workshop.Church Teachings: [00:57:47] aaaAAAaaa returns to explore the Mormon Church’s long, messy love affair with business ventures. He tracks the evolution from the Nauvoo House’s cash-for-boarding model to ZCMI, sugar companies, luxury malls, cattle ranches, and ultimately, Ensign Peak Advisors. Basically: the Church started with tithing and ended with portfolio diversification. Along the way, he responds to modern rationalizations that God just wants His kingdom “temporally independent,” while pointing out how far that has spiraled into billion-dollar investments and "consecrated capitalism."History: [01:17:27] Abigail continues the tangled saga of Mormon fundamentalism with the terrifying tale of the LeBarons. Picking up where Musser and the Allreds left off, she introduces us to Ervil LeBaron, the polygamist prophet turned cult leader who orchestrated a spree of murders in the name of priesthood succession. From issuing hit lists to organizing the assassination of Rulon Allred, Ervil’s theology was 10% scripture and 90% mafia. Abigail traces the roots, the splintering sects, and the horrifying legacy that turned rural Utah and northern Mexico into the backdrop for real-deal religious violence. If it sounds like a Netflix documentary—it already is.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailAbish returns with a drink and a tale of gastrointestinal revelation, both from Joseph Smith and her own soul. Inspired by D&C 121’s wildly inappropriate phrasing—Joe pleading with God to “move His bowels” in compassion—she whips up the “Move Yo Bowels Mango Marg”. It’s a premixed mango marg, blended with ice, salt-rimmed glass, star sprinkles, orange and lime slices, and an optional mezcal floater for that fiery poop finale.The intro spirals (as it should) into tangents involving fingernail trauma, sixth-grade revenge cookies laced with laxatives, and the correct Canadian term for a corn dog (it’s a pogo, and HR really tried to say that professionally). The chaos is unmatched.Scriptures: [00:27:21]aaaAAAaaa turns the Liberty Jail letters into a fully unhinged dramatic reenactment called “The Liberty Jail Dialogues” starring Joseph Smeagol Smith and God Gollum, the gaslighter. Yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like. Joseph pleads for mercy, and God responds with cryptic threats, veiled insults, and a soft-launch of Mormon polytheism in the footnotes.Key highlights:“Endure well” = divine gaslighting“We will exalt you” = Who is we, God??God dunking on Job againA full-on trauma checklist featuring wolves, pits, and crying children“Your oppressors will melt like the whore frost” (yes, that got a tangent too)Joe calling God out for having inconsistent vibesIt’s Joe having a breakdown in jail, writing weird poetry, and God answering like a dramatic theater kid who just read Dune.Church Teachings: [00:45:54]Abish steps in for Moroni and gives us the church’s spin on D&C 121’s priesthood and persecution rhetoric. She references a talk that turns divine chastisement into an emotional manipulation masterclass. Then, she answers a “Dear Abby” style letter from someone asking if they’ll still get blessings even though they’re bad at charity. Spoiler: the blessings are eternal, but the gaslighting is immediate.Abish doesn’t shy away from pointing out how often the church uses “we’re persecuted” as an excuse to keep members loyal and distracted. She also critiques how priesthood power gets framed as both a sacred responsibility and a license to control—as long as it’s wrapped in “gentleness and meekness,” of course.History: [01:10:32]Abigail gives us a two-part historical descent into nonsense and murder. First up, the birth of chiropractic medicine, courtesy of D.D. Palmer, a magnetic healer who claimed he restored a janitor’s hearing by realigning his spine. If that sounds like a cult, just wait: his son, B.J. Palmer, took it mainstream—with a side of racism and anti-vax rhetoric. Yes, chiropractics were founded by ghost hunters with strong MLM energy.Then we return to the ongoing drama of Mormon fundamentalists. Abigail covers the final chapter of the Allreds vs. LeBarons saga, ending in cold-blooded assassinations, prophetic chaos, and factions fracturing faster than a vertebra in a bad neck adjustment. Rena Chynoweth, a teenage bride turned hitwoman, testifies against her prophet-husband in a murder trial, and the whole thing ends up as a made-for-TV movie and a textbook case of “what the hell, Utah?”Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailaaaAAAaaa kicks us off with a caffeine-laced theological sugar rush called Saith The Lord, inspired by D&C 117, which manages to say “saith the Lord” fourteen times in just sixteen verses. Subtlety? Not Joseph’s strong suit. This drink is what happens when camping leftovers meet divine inspiration: coffee vodka, Kahlua, Baileys, a splash of those bottled Starbucks mocha lattes, and whipped cream. You know, just like the pioneers drank on the trail.Naturally, the drink segment spirals into topics like JoJo Siwa rage, the Ballerina Farm tragedy, the theology of ice machines, and how Neopets taught us the economy before D&C did. A classic chaotic intro.Scriptures: [00:34:25]Moroni returns with biting commentary on the absurd demands of early Mormon revelations. In D&C 117, Joseph tells Newel K. Whitney and William Marks to abandon all their businesses and property to move to Missouri—because God’s into minimalism now, apparently. And Olive Granger is left to mop up the financial fallout, but don’t worry, God will remember his name (unless He forgets it, in which case… sorry).In D&C 118, mobs are burning towns and saints are getting evicted, but God’s like, “Hey, 12 Apostles, show up at the Far West Temple site next April. Then go preach in England.” Good luck with that itinerary, boys.D&C 119 brings the birth of tithing—because what’s a restoration without a revenue stream? Saints are told to donate their surplus property (even though they’ve just been dispossessed and are broke), followed by 10% annually for the rest of their lives. And in D&C 120, the church leaders are given divine permission to play Monopoly with that tithing cash—zero transparency, infinite vibes. It’s the sacred origin story of the billion-dollar shell game we know and love today.Church Teachings – [00:48:57]Abish tackles how the modern church handles money and asks the question we’ve all been thinking: What the hell are they spending it on? Instead of bailing out real estate disasters or stockpiling in Ensign Peak vaults, maybe—just maybe—they could, say, fund education, feed people, or stop treating their $100B+ fortune like a divine hedge fund.She drops a list of things that would be better uses of church tithing money than hoarding it in investments, including reparations, global aid, and basic human decency. Spoiler: the church doesn’t do those. But God definitely wants you to cough up 10% of your income so someone can build a redundant temple in West Jordan.History: Rulon [01:24:07]Abigail dives into the saga of Rulon Allred, spiritual successor to Joseph Musser and a key architect of post-Manifesto Mormon fundamentalism. Rulon turned priesthood keys into spiritual NFTs, claiming that his line of authority made him the one mighty and strong. He founded the Apostolic United Brethren (AUB), brought in new polygamist converts, and helped expand the theological scaffolding that justified plural marriage for decades after the mainstream church abandoned it.Of course, like many fundy figureheads, Rulon had enemies—including rival sects—and was ultimately assassinated in 1977 by cultists sent by Ervil LeBaron (yes, that LeBaron). His legacy lives on in prepper enclaves, denim-heavy family portraits, and Utah basements stocked with powdered milk and patriarchy.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailMoroni steps up with Zion’s Crown, a drink that tastes like spiritual opulence and religious overcompensation. This royal elixir mixes Crown Royal Blackberry, Chambord, lime juice, simple syrup, ginger beer, and fresh blackberries. It’s festive, fruity, and apparently symbolic: blackberry for royalty and identity (shout-out to D&C 115’s full name drop of the church), simple syrup for Zion’s unity, and ginger beer for prophetic zing. And yes, the drink segment spirals into prepping tips, alcohol hoarding, and how Minnesota is about to be the new Mormon Valhalla.Scriptures: [00:22:41]Abish dives into the Isaiah fanfiction that is D&C 113, where Joseph Smith rides into Missouri and is like, “Let’s not talk about the failed bank or the mobs. Let’s talk about Isaiah—and guess what? Isaiah was talking about me!” It’s revelation by way of narcissism. D&C 114 brings the real drama: Joseph Smith excommunicates half the Quorum of the Twelve and various OGs (Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, Martin Harris, etc.) for being mad that his divine bank tanked and took their money with it.And then we get the truth bomb about Thomas B. Marsh, and that he didn’t leave the church over stolen cream. That story? Made up years later by George Albert Smith to cover up the real reason—Marsh was horrified by the Danites, Joseph’s violent theocratic militia. He blew the whistle, testified to the Missouri government, and helped trigger the infamous extermination order. The church, not loving that PR, replaced him with a “cream skimming” cautionary tale and pretended his wife caused the downfall. It’s petty, inaccurate, and deeply on-brand.Church Teachings: [00:57:04]aaaAAAaaa unpacks the church’s spin on Isaiah—basically, “He was prophesying the Restoration, duh.” The church doubles down on Joseph’s re-interpretations, treating Isaiah like a 700 BC missionary tract. According to modern teachings, Isaiah was essentially Joseph’s hype man across centuries. The narrative avoids context, history, and Hebrew—because nothing kills the spirit quite like biblical scholarship. Expect more typology than logic and a whole lot of “Isaiah meant this all along, obviously.”History: [01:14:26]Abigail digs into Joseph Musser, the proto-fundy who helped launch modern Mormon fundamentalism. Musser was excommunicated for clinging to plural marriage long after the Manifesto made it unfashionable. He went on to organize splinter groups, pen doctrine-heavy screeds, and serve as one of the early architects of the Council of Friends, the group that eventually gave us the FLDS. His writings provided the justification (read: cover story) for polygamist sects and are still cited today by fringe groups.Musser didn’t just leave; he franchised. His legacy is a roadmap of offshoots, splinters, and splinters of splinters, all clutching their 1886 revelation like a security blanket. Basically, Musser is the spiritual granddaddy of the guys in denim jumpers stockpiling dry beans and wives.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailWith Abish out sick (may she recover swiftly from her bout with “consumption”), Abigail steps in for the drink segment. The result? A potent surprise called The Fool’s Inheritance, inspired by fool’s gold, disappointment, and the inevitable letdown of spiritual get-rich-quick schemes. This martini-shaped sucker punch features bourbon, elderflower liqueur, a whisper of lemon juice (we're working with scraps), peach puree syrup, Angostura bitters, and is topped with soda water and edible gold dust. It tastes like broken promises and regret, but with sparkles.Naturally, this led to a full-blown discussion on apocalypse baking, sodium bicarbonate mining in Utah, and how the Salt Flats will one day power the birthday cake industry after civilization collapses. Truly, it’s like Doomsday Preppers meets Chopped.Scriptures: D&C 110–112 – [00:19:38] aaaAAAaaa takes us on a journey through D&C 110–112 with the interpretive lens of “drunk Uncle Joseph” slurring revelation to Thomas B. Marsh on the Kirtland Temple porch. In Section 110, Joseph and Oliver casually bump into Jesus, Moses, Elias, and Elijah in a divine relay of priesthood keys. Moses drops off the keys to gathering Israel, Elias hands over Abrahamic blessings, and Elijah gives them the spiritual equivalent of a family tree starter pack.Then in Section 111, Joseph heads to Salem, MA to treasure hunt, only for God to go, “Surprise! The real treasure is the friends you made along the way.” Classic bait-and-switch revelation.By the time we hit Section 112, aaaAAAaaa introduces a drinking game: guess whether a quote is from scripture or just his notes being unhinged. The line is blurry, the vibe is feral, and everything somehow ends with a warning about Billy running his mouth again.Church Teachings: [00:40:13] Moroni starts by detouring into a passionate breakdown of the electron transport chain, reminding everyone that real power comes from cellular respiration (take that, anti-science sentiment). Then he pivots hard into a fire-and-brimstone roast of Ezra Taft Benson, quoting him saying, “One of the chief means of misleading our youth and destroying the family unit is our educational institutions.” Moroni’s response: “I know all that biochemistry because of education, bitch.” Cue mic drop.He critiques how Mormon leadership has historically villainized secular education while simultaneously depending on highly educated members to keep their theocratic bureaucracy afloat. Irony? Meet priesthood.History: The Kingston Cooperative – [01:12:03] Abigail closes out with the chilling saga of the Kingston Cooperative in Layton, Utah, an economic and religious fringe group that turned consecration into control. She unpacks how the Kingston clan structured their lives around a united order-like system—except with a hefty side of nepotism, child labor, and deeply questionable family dynamics.From stockpiling assets to maintaining power through intermarriage, the Kingstons turned their religious offshoot into a dynasty that would make Brigham Young look like a socialist. Abigail, as always, brings the receipts and the horror, making it very clear that “The Fool’s Inheritance” could easily refer to anyone born into that mess.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailaaaAAAaaa rolls out the cocktail segment with “Theological Ventriloquism,” a drink as bizarre and on-brand as the name suggests. Made with pineapple rum, banana rum, blue curaçao, Sprite Zero and enough pineapple juice to drown your doubts, it’s as tropical as Joseph Smith’s theological gymnastics. Why the name? Because Section 109 of D&C is essentially God dictating a prayer to Joseph… to say back to God. It’s divine sock-puppetry at its finest. Along the way, we get drink banter, body horror from hormone fog and important updates on Pedro Pascal look-alike contests. You know, essentials.Scriptures: [00:22:05] Moroni dons the voice of Belle Gibson for a dramatic reading of D&C 108 and 109, breathing new, morally questionable life into the text. Section 108 is a divine pat on the head to Lyman Sherman, who just wanted to know his duties and got an affirmation sermon from God's mouthpiece instead. Section 109, the Kirtland Temple dedication, gets full Belle treatment—a breathy, mystical affirmation-fest complete with turmeric hugs and cosmic journaling. And yes, we ask the important questions, like whether coffee enemas are Word of Wisdom-approved (probably not, but they're loophole-adjacent).Church Teachings: [00:41:55] Abish pulls together a chaotic, glorious mishmash of masonic cosplay, temple dedication lore, and classic “was it Mormon or Masonic” trivia. We learn that the Kirtland Temple wasn’t just a building—it was spiritual Coachella: fire from heaven, angel sightings, people speaking in tongues, and maybe even a running fart. Saints had fasted themselves into delirium and dove into naked anointings and oil baths, all while Joseph played dress-up with Masonic rituals and tried to pass them off as revelation. There’s also a drinking game to test which weird rituals were OG Joseph and which were Freemason fanfic. Bonus: this all bankrupted the church. Cheers!History: [01:04:18] Abigail takes us deep into the chaotic writings of Ogden Kraut, the Z-list celebrity of fringe Mormonism and a man who churned out over 70 books of uncorrelated doctrine while living just outside the bounds of excommunication. She walks us through his prolific self-publishing, his homespun theology, and his posthumous status as a minor prophet among polygamists and prepper sects. From adam-god theology to anti-correlation rants, Ogden wrote like he was being chased by a deadline from Kolob. It’s a fascinating look at the kind of weird that correlation committees were invented to suppress.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailMoroni opens the episode with the “Govern-Mint Mojito”—a smoky, mint-heavy concoction that’s somehow both refreshing and authoritarian, much like the subject of today’s scripture. Packed with mezcal, crème de menthe, citrus, and ginger ale, it’s the cocktail equivalent of a hostile Church disciplinary council: intense, confusing, and liable to make you question your choices. The gang also swaps stories about being chronically online, catastrophically hormonal, and deeply disappointed by timekeeping systems. So, you know, standard vibes.Scriptures: [00:20:46] Abish takes us through D&C 107, which might be Joseph Smith’s most elaborate game of organizational Calvinball. We’re talking multiple priesthoods, multiple presidencies, and enough confusing titles to make a mid-tier corporate flowchart look elegant. The drinking game? Sip every time someone says “priesthood.” So by verse 3, you’re already repenting via Gatorade. Between Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, Elmo trauma, and a special shoutout to Abby Cadabby’s tragic backstory, this segment has everything—including a fierce takedown of celestial nepotism.Church Teachings: [00:53:23] aaaAAAaaa drunkenly stumbles through the Church’s official teachings like a bishop trying to run ward council on NyQuil. D&C 107 is revealed to be a Frankenstein’s monster of earlier revelations and post-Science Camp promotions. The theme? Congratulations, you’ve been spiritually voluntold into leadership. No pay, no real authority—just vibes, responsibility, and an eternal line on your celestial LinkedIn. It’s the ecclesiastical equivalent of a company giving you a new title instead of a raise.History: [01:22:05] Abigail launches a brand new series on Mormon offshoot cults from the 60s and 70s, kicking off with the Dream Mine—aka the Relief Mine, aka Mormon Gold Rush 2: Electric Boogaloo. Enter John Hyrum Koyle, who claimed there was hidden gold in a Utah mountain that would save the Church from financial ruin. Spoiler: there’s no gold. But there are UFOs, ghosts, weather weapons, and a prophecy-powered pyramid scheme. It's like a Dan Brown novel had a baby with Prepper TikTok and baptized it in Spanish Fork.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailThe gang welcomes back Claudia, who takes the wheel with this episode’s cocktail—though even she couldn’t settle on a name. It began as “Old Joe’s In-sip-ration” but somewhere along the way morphed into the more chaotic (and honestly more iconic) “Teeny Peeny Tini.” Whatever you call it, it’s peach vodka and peach juice shaken with wild abandon and garnished with raspberries, because we are nothing if not fancy. Claudia also shares a DoorDash horror story that involves $400 worth of food, a $47 tip, and zero actual delivery. The gang veers off into important Pringles analysis, the mechanics of beer can chicken, and straight pride parades (spoiler: nobody smiles and the flags are just laminated bigotry). By the time we finally roll into the scriptures, the room has already been spiritually and emotionally preheated.Scriptures: [00:15:13]aaaAAAaaa walks us through D&C sections 105 and 106, dragging us all back to Zion’s Camp—the LARP expedition to Missouri that God called off because, apparently, the Saints weren’t vibing hard enough. In true GASP fashion, we get a reading of the “scriptures according to vibes and post-ponents,” where God delays promises, blames the victims, and basically tells everyone to shut up and wait. aaaAAAaaa gives us peak satire with gems like “Suffer, therefore, until you learn, for I am not your kindergarten teacher, but your eternal emotional growth facilitator.” D&C 106 gets covered too, but let’s be real—it’s eight verses of filler.Church Teachings: [00:36:16]Moroni brings us a scorching takedown of the LDS Church’s classic excuse: “It’s all in God’s timing.” Starting with examples like the priesthood ban and moving through LGBTQ+ policies, the September Six, and Dallin H. Oaks’ greatest hits, this segment unpacks how divine delay conveniently shields leaders from accountability. The gang skewers the church’s habit of reframing harmful decisions as spiritual tests and celebrates such mental gymnastics with hypothetical Olympic medals. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll wonder how many more “timetables” Oaks can squeeze into one devotional quote.History: [00:57:00]Abigail finishes things off by looking at the Correlation Committee—aka the Mormon Church’s in-house PR, theology, and vibes management team. She traces its bureaucratic grip on every part of modern Mormonism, from curriculum to conference talks to the sanitized doctrine we all love to hate. The history of how Bruce R. McConkie’s Mormon Doctrine was initially condemned and then quietly assimilated into correlated materials gets special attention. Turns out, when you can’t kill an idea, you just edit it into your manuals and act like you were on board the whole time. This one’s for the nerds who love a good flowchart of institutional control.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show

Send us Fan MailThis episode delivers a holy trinity of chaos: tithing-based cocktails, Joel and Ellie doing anti-capitalist scripture theater, and Abigail dragging Mormon Doctrine like it owes her money (because it does). Welcome to the episode where everyone realizes that “sacred stewardship” just means “give us your money, peasant,” but with more mezcal.aaaAAAaa opens the episode with Tithe Hard, a smoky, almondy concoction meant to capture the “voluntary redistribution” vibes of D&C 104. It’s mezcal meets amaretto, lemon, simple syrup, and bitters—shaken and garnished with a chocolate coin that screams “render unto Caesar but keep the receipt.”He gives us a quick breakdown of the drink’s inspiration (United Order cosplay) and shares that you’re supposed to say “Welcome to Zion, pal” when you garnish. Die Hard meets consecration. It’s perfect for sipping while your ward building collapses into financial despair.Scriptures: [00:24:48] Moroni brings the scripture segment and opens with an electrifying anthem about the electron transport chain, because obviously. “Pump That Chain (ATP on the Floor)” is a biological banger and probably the only club track where cytochrome C gets name-dropped. Ten out of ten protons.Then, he digs into D&C 104, which is basically God’s attempt at running a communal startup (spoiler: it fails). This section is the dissolution of the United Order, rebranded with a fresh spreadsheet and a lot of talk about stewardship. God divides up property like He’s on Shark Tank, says “don’t mess this up,” and demands that any surplus go to the poor. In theory, it’s Christian communism. In practice, it’s Joseph Smith giving himself a mansion.Moroni tells the story Last of Us-style, casting Joel and Ellie as scripture commentators and transforming the whole thing into a post-apocalyptic anti-capitalist fireside. It is sincerely better than 90% of church lessons you’ve ever had. And no, he didn’t jack off in a 747. Probably.Church Teachings: [00:37:58] Abish takes on how the modern church teaches (and distorts) D&C 104. She calls it “God’s original business plan” before He apparently outsourced everything to Ensign Peak Advisors. Originally, it was all about collective stewardship and helping the poor. Today? Not so much.She absolutely roasts the $100–300 billion hoard the church is sitting on while Salt Lake’s homeless population is getting pushed around and starving. Meanwhile, the temples get two baptistries, gold leaf, and ceilings high enough to echo your spiritual disillusionment. She skewers the way tithing has turned into a subscription fee for salvation, complete with zero transparency, and the transformation of welfare programs into PR opportunities with strings attached. Somewhere, Jesus is flipping over the dessert bar at City Creek.History: [00:59:19] Abigail cracks open the cursed tome that is Mormon Doctrine by Bruce R. McDonkey—and yes, she reads it with the disdain of someone who’s just found out their ex wrote a manifesto. She focuses on the ways McConkie’s book cemented orthodoxy, defined generational trauma, and poisoned the church’s teaching well for decades.This book, which wasn’t officially doctrine but was sold in every Deseret Book and quoted like it was scripture, contains gems like “see Mormons: Latter-day Saints” (a Satanic victory, according to Abigail). It promoted anti-intellectualism, exclusivity, and the kind of iron-rod rigidity that makes room for neither grace nor brains. It was a one-man wrecking ball of theological arrogance. And Abigail, naturally, reads excerpts in her best “I’ve had enough of this bullshit” voice.Follow us on Insta @gr8_and_spacious, Twitter @gr8andspacious, Discord (https://discord.gg/pdeXSQdga) and Reddit u/gr8_and_spacious for behind-the-scenes shenanigans, hilarious memes, and maybe even a sneak peek at our next episode..If you've got a burning question, a hilarious anecdote, or just want to say hi, shoot us an epistle at [email protected] don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review of our podcast!Support the show