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I collect Mormon-made media

In 1953, the church hired Disney animator Judge Whitaker to head the BYU Motion Picture Studio. The resulting film-forward culture propelled the church’s correlation crackdown on gender roles and lines of authority—each film a tiny vehicle for mind control.

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And stitch clips together

Sweet stories of positivity and family values hide the sting of what’s actually being said. Remove the plot and you’ll hear it more clearly. Every script was crafted to persuade, using melodrama to elicit emotion they could then sell to you as an answer.

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To examine oppressive systems

Stripped to their parts and held next to each other, these films reveal patterns. And if you add some amateur critical theory to the study of them, the larger picture of Mormonism’s cultural impact shifts into focus, revealing harmful “American values” inside neat little VHS packages.

 

Why?

Because Mormonism is not unique in its harm. It is rooted in settler-colonialism and depends on systematically conditioning its members to internalize and uphold larger systems:

 

  • Capitalism

  • Racism

  • White supremacy

  • Nationalism

  • Individualism

  • Imperialism

  • Sexism and misogyny

  • Classism

  • Homophobia

  • Transphobia

  • Ableism

  • Binary thinking

  • Scarcity mindset

  • Punishment culture

  • Purity culture

  • Perfectionism

 The mission

In studying the deluge of Mormon-produced media from 1960ish onward, I’ve realized these videos offer a scaffolding of sorts for deprogramming.

I hope that as you review these videos you once saw in primary/Sunday school/seminary/institute, you’ll find validation and support for healing on two planes.

  1. Personal healing

  • Understand the power dynamics you experienced

  • Unpack fear-based programming still inside your body

  • Locate and reclaim the parts of self lost from a high-control religion

2. Collective healing

  • Explore the connections between Mormonism and American culture at large

  • Identify how these systems have played out historically, and who they’ve harmed

  • Find personally meaningful ways to act and facilitate mutual liberation for all

 Follow the project

For now the library lives on Instagram. The 60-second limit creates an interesting challenge, at least, and hopefully the familiar platform makes it easy to engage with.

However, I am working on a sortable video gallery that lives here, because Instagram puts money in billionaire’s pockets, and it behooves us all to move away from communicative capitalism.

@latterdaylabia

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The church exploits unpaid labor, this we know. Apply a little social theory, and that exploitation gets even darker. —— ✍️Karl Marx wrote about capitalists exploiting the labor of the working class. ✍️But Silvia Federici takes his wor
💌 Happy Valentine’s Day! 💌 Nothing makes me feel love like singing “He knows I will follow him” and “give all my life to him.” This video was produced by Embryo Productions, which is part of Excel Entertainment&mdash
God will bless you IF you do what he expects of you. And God expects Michael to give two years of free labor to a corporation—and pay for the privilege to do so. ☎️Call Marx, we’ve got worker exploitation on our hands! Laborers producin
🪨Sharing this for the special effects alone🪨 Second video is what I pictured the first time I watched this. Forgive my amateur editing skills. Overall it’s a 10/10 on the imperialism vibes scale. —— SOURCE 📼CES Church Histor
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