Of all the moves made by President Russell M. Nelson during his nearly eight-year tenure as leader of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, none was as controversial and complicated to implement as insisting that everyone essentially eschew the word “Mormon.”
For Nelson, who died in September, it seemed crucial to remind outsiders — and insiders — that Jesus Christ is part of the church’s full name.
The 2018 command was so unequivocal that the faith and the faithful scrambled to follow their prophet. Websites were changed — mormon.org became churchofjesuschrist.org, for instance. Even the renowned Mormon Tabernacle Choir lost its signature identifier.
It hasn’t been easy, however, to overturn a nearly 200-year-old “nickname,” one that had been embraced and even promoted by church founder Joseph Smith and subsequent church presidents. “I’m a Mormon” was the centerpiece of a sweeping church advertising campaign in the 2000s. Mitt Romney’s historic run for president was widely known as a “Mormon moment.” And other prominent members, (including Romney himself and “Jeopardy!” host Ken Jennings) continued to use the term.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Mitt Romney, speaking in 2024, was at the center of a "Mormon moment" when he ran for president.
As recently as December, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox referred to himself as a “Mormon” in his appearance with Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a “Jew.”
In McKay Coppins’ 2021 Atlantic piece, “The Most American Religion,” about his faith and the global church, he used the banned word 143 times.
[Read more • What does search data reveal about “Mormon” vs. “Latter-day Saint”?]
Coppins is no heretic, inclined to rebel against the prophet’s rule. The reporter used Mormon “for clarity’s sake,” he wrote somewhat apologetically, and also because the church’s name “presented a multisyllabic writerly dilemma that my own God-given talents left me powerless to solve.”
Clarity — not lack of respect or disobedience or mean-spiritedness — has been the dilemma faced by journalists and scholars as well as members since Nelson, seven months after taking the faith’s helm, denounced Mormon as shorthand for the church and its members.
But will his successors have the same drive?
New church President Dallin H. Oaks has never expressed “a similar anxiety” about the name, says historian Benjamin Park. “There are plenty of anecdotes that Oaks still uses the ‘M’ word prolifically.”
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) All eyes will be on President Dallin H. Oaks, speaking at the funeral service for apostle Jeffrey R. Holland in December, to see if he continues his predecessor's drive to remove the "Mormon" nickname.
Others speculate on social media that Mormon as no-no might be short-lived.
“The return of Mormon to the lexicon (or rather the retreat of pious policing of people’s use of it),” says one commenter, “will be shockingly swift.”
“If the word Mormon was good enough for Joseph Smith,” writes another, “it’s good enough for me.”
So what has been the overall effect of Nelson’s edict? Has it been successful in changing minds about Mormonism, its people or its beliefs? Has it altered members’ search habits or self-identity? Has it made them more Christlike? Or, some ask, has it caused members to shame one another?
Not just rebranding
In his explanation of the push to use the full name of the church and avoid the Mormon nickname, Nelson acknowledged that many would oppose the move.
“Because of the digital world in which we live and with search engine optimization that helps all of us find information we need almost instantly — including information about the Lord’s church — critics say that a correction at this point is unwise,” Nelson said in 2018. “Others feel that because we are known so widely as ‘Mormons’ and as the ‘Mormon Church,’ we should make the best of it.”
(Rick Bowmer | AP) The late church President Russell M. Nelson prays during General Conference in October 2018, when he directed members, scholars and reporters to stop using "Mormon" when describing Latter-day Saints and their religion.
If it were simply “branding a man-made organization, those arguments might prevail,” the Latter-day Saint leader declared. “But in this crucial matter, we look to him whose church this is and acknowledge that the Lord’s ways are not, and never will be, man’s ways.”
And the Utah-based faith is pleased by the results so far.
“Preliminary findings show consistent use of the correct name of the church has strengthened perceptions of the church as Christian and increased overall awareness of the church worldwide,” spokesperson Doug Andersen says in a statement. ”These insights continue to guide efforts to more clearly represent the central role of Jesus Christ in the church’s identity.”
Still, it was a big ask.
It’s not like an individual who decides to return to the formal name Kathryn from the clipped Kathy, or from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali. Nor is it synonymous with some transgender people asking others to use their chosen pronouns — they and them. This is a whole group of people being directed to switch from a familiar single word to a lengthy mouthful. Consider the fact that the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints changed its name to Community of Christ nearly 25 years ago, and most writers continue to mention its previous identity for clarity.
For some members, though, it has been a crucial corrective.
“I took it as a reminder that the church’s name was inspired and has meaning, and that using that inspired, meaningful name will help internalize that meaning in me and remind me that I have entered into a covenant to take his name upon me,” Andrew Karpenter writes on social media. “I took it as a call to Latter-day Saints around the world to remember the great and marvelous work to which we have been called: to prepare ourselves and the world for [Christ’s] coming.”
Luke Lyman, a graduate of church-owned Brigham Young University, defends Nelson’s move in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece.
“I suspect Nelson wanted people to trip over the name — knowing that some would be forced to reckon with the words in the middle and the question of what it means to call yourself a follower of Jesus Christ’s gospel,” writes Lyman, a former Journal fellow. “…No faith worth its salt is easy, and no faith worth its salt is rote. The unwieldiness of ‘The Church of the Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ reminds us of that.”
What about the media?
Nelson said he was confident that “responsible media will be sympathetic in responding to our request.”
And, in 2021, apostle Neil L. Andersen reiterated Nelson’s call for “fair-minded [members] of the media to honor our desire to be called by our name of nearly 200 years.”
Trouble is, the Mormon nickname also has been around for those same centuries. And it remains the most recognizable term for members of the church — easy to remember, to translate, and, frankly, to use in a sentence.
(Diane Winston) Diane Winston, Knight Chair in Media and Religion at the University of Southern California, says most people still don't know whom Latter-day Saints are.
Journalists, scholars and students still use the term “because of convenience,” says Diane Winston, who holds the Knight Chair in Media and Religion at the University of Southern California. “Most people still don’t know what a Latter-day Saint is.”
Replacing Mormon with Latter-day Saints “challenges a speech pattern that is familiar and recognizable,” she says, “while offering something that is not.”
Oftentimes, when groups get a nickname they don’t like, “they adopt it and make it their own — like gay people using queer. By embracing it, the sting of the word is gone,” she says. “When Joseph Smith adopted Mormon, it took away the power of the insult by making it an everyday word.”
A Christian by any other name
Because there are so many variations on those who claim Jesus Christ as their central figure of worship, a church’s name — or nickname — can tell others which part of the theology or practice they emphasize.
They’re convenient ways to differentiate among the groups, and the Mormon tag is no different. Presbyterian, Catholic, Lutheran, Baptist, Methodist, Anglican, Quakers. These are one-word names for Christian denominations. None of them contains the words Jesus or Christ and yet they are all accepted as Christian.
Using the full name of the church “hasn’t answered the complexity of whether we are Christian or not,” says writer and marketer Neylan McBaine — who launched the Mormon Women Project in 2010 (renamed the LDS Women Project). “Mormonism presents other distinctions from mainstream Christianity.”
Mormon has the added benefit, she says, of connecting the faithful with their signature scripture (the Book of Mormon) and their history.
Giving up the word that described members since the beginning “feels like we are betraying our ancestors, turning our backs to our heritage and the people associated with the term,” McBaine says, and Latter-day Saint “doesn’t mention Jesus either.”
(Rick Bowmer | AP) Writer and marketer Neylan McBaine laments that "it feels subversive" to utter the word "Mormon."
McBaine was on the creative team at church-owned Bonneville International that assembled the “I’m a Mormon” ad blitz.
Starting in 2010, it gathered hundreds of short video or photographic bios of individual members (along with a “Meet the Mormons” movie) as a way to show outsiders that Latter-day Saints come in all shapes, sizes and colors — and that they’re not so different; they’re your colleagues, friends and neighbors.
The effort produced “one of the highest points in positive perception of the church in modern American culture,” McBaine recalls, “since the Mormon Tabernacle Choir performed at Mount Rushmore in 1962.”
Language is “power and representation,” the marketer says. “It is a tool we use to communicate who we are, but it’s also a shorthand that relies on shared contextual understanding with the person you’re addressing. We don’t have a shared context with traditional Christians — and that’s where we failed.”
Abandoning the Mormon lingo also has been a “net negative” inside the church, McBaine argues, because it has undermined “our sense of community.”
Some members continue to use Mormon “because it’s easy and because there’s also a deep nostalgia and a deep historical significance to it,” she says, “but it feels subversive when you say it now.”
Losing a public identity
Nelson may not have seen his dictum as a question of branding, but that is the inescapable conclusion from outsiders.
Branding is about “awareness and perception,” says Alan Reighard, a marketing expert with Love Communications in Salt Lake City, “and ‘Mormon’ had both.”
(Reighard is a business partner of Tom Love, board chair of the nonprofit Salt Lake Tribune.)
The Utah Jazz played for years at the Delta Center. Owners then changed it to EnergySolutions Arena and then Vivint, Reighard says, but most fans still called it the Delta Center.
The heart of the problem, he says, “is that when people hear the name Mormon, they don’t think Christian,” he says. “There’s so much awareness of the Mormon name and all this blowing up — asking people to use a longer name — will make it even harder.”
The bar was “too high for the Delta Center,” Reighard says. “It sure seems too high for the church.”
Rather than change the name, he says, why not alter “the perception of the name?”
That was a principal aim of the “I’m a Mormon” initiative.
The scholarly dilemma
(Mike Hoogterp) Historian Benjamin Park says church founder Joseph Smith eventually accepted the "Mormon" nickname.
The earliest nickname given to Smith’s followers was “Mormonite,” says Park, the Latter-day Saint historian, “and it was meant as a slur related to their belief in the Book of Mormon.”
That soon evolved into “Mormon,” and believers quickly learned to “lean into the title rather than oppose it,” Park says. Smith declared that to be a “Mormon” meant “to gather all the ‘good’ and ‘truth’ in the world, a proud description that became embedded within the tradition.”
Out of respect, Park uses the church’s full name when referring to the institution after 2018, in line with Nelson’s desires, while using “LDS” (though the church’s style guide frowns upon that acronym) and “Latter-day Saint” when “discussing something particular to the Utah-based denomination, rather than the wider diaspora.”
But Mormon “remains the best, and most historically accurate, description,” he says, “to use when referring to the human, cultural and performative aspects of the many traditions that date back to Joseph Smith.”
‘Puzzled’ by the change
(Laurie Maffly-Kipp) Laurie Maffly-Kipp, director of Mormon studies at the University of Virginia, says "honest wrestling" with whether to use the the "Mormon" term is not a "sign of disrespect."
Many of her students and colleagues “are puzzled by the change in nomenclature,” says Laurie Maffly-Kipp, director of Mormon studies at the University of Virginia. “Outsiders typically don’t understand the reasons behind it and want to be respectful but sometimes are unsure how to do so.”
This is especially true when studying religious history, Maffly-Kipp says, “when one is reading about many, many people who called themselves Mormons. Is it more respectful to honor their own self-identification? Is it incumbent on nonmembers to follow the teachings of the prophet on this issue?
“Honest wrestling with the change,” she adds, is not “a sign of disrespect.”
View from abroad
(Wilfried Decoo) Wilfried Decoo, a Latter-day Saint in Belgium, urges the church to lean into using "Mormon" for positive messages about the faith and its members.
It took decades for Europeans to convince their wary neighbors that Mormonism was not a cult, says Belgian Latter-day Saint Wilfried Decoo. They pointed with pride to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the “I’m a Mormon” campaign, and the “Mormon Helping Hands” emblazoned on yellow shirts when members pitched in at disaster sites. The press reported on all of these.
Mormon became part of “the normal, valued world,” Decoo writes in an email. “Since the name change, however, we cannot tie positive connotations to ‘Mormon’ anymore since the word is forbidden.”
The international media, meanwhile, has plenty of space to link “problematic connotations to Mormon, reinforced by documentaries on Mormon polygamists, the ‘Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,’ ‘American Primeval,’ etc., all of which are on European channels,” he writes. “That weird image is now the prevailing one.”
Whenever the church sends out a news release, for example, about the temple being built in Brussels, with the faith’s long official name, he writes, “the press is quick to clarify it’s really about those weird Mormons, thus reinforcing the impression we’re actually trying to hide a cultish identity.”
Tying the church’s massive humanitarian efforts to a name like “Mormon Humanitarian Services,” Decoo writes, “would do a lot to connect Mormon to Christian service.”
Lost in translation
A number of modern believers forget or never knew that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was founded in the 1830s, an era of concern about Christ’s Second Coming.
One unintended consequence of constantly repeating the church’s full name is that many might not focus on the “Jesus Christ” part but rather the “Latter-day Saint” mention.
As a proper noun, Mormon is the same in every language, but Latter-day Saints can be translated differently. In Chinese, it is “Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints Church” or literally “Jesus Christ Later-Period Holy-Saints Church.” In Korean, it is the “holy ones of the last day.”
In Spanish, it is mostly translated as “Saints of the Last Days,” says Ignacio Garcia, who taught Western and Latino history at BYU until he retired in September.
Many Latino members and outsiders, he says, continue to use Mormon among themselves.
The name shift hasn’t convinced many people that Latter-day Saints are Christians, Garcia says. “We so promote our differences that we add to that perception. We are the biggest culprits.”
And members in Russia and Eastern European countries are hesitant to call themselves “Saints,” since that has specific connotations in the Eastern Orthodox churches.
Within the faith
Nelson’s direction “has been a blessing to my life personally and as a journalist and writer,” says Christopher Cunningham, editor of Public Square Magazine, an online publication written from a Latter-day Saint perspective. “His direction has helped me be more purposeful in my discipleship of Christ, and to consider his life and teachings more often.”
Cunningham and some fellow believers go further to call out media and members who don’t follow Nelson’s directive. Several claim that church members using Mormon “is like using the N-word for Black Americans.”
“How adamant a church member is about the religion’s official title is a useful proxy for the kind of church member they are,” Maile Hatch Urbancic writes on social media, “or how comfortable nonmembers can be around them.”
For her part, Latter-day Saint podcaster Susan Meredith Hinckley doesn’t think Nelson’s message has changed outsiders’ view or been helpful to insiders.
“At the time, I worried it would become yet another shibboleth — a sorting mechanism used by some members to determine others’ ‘faithfulness,’” Hinckley writes on social media. “As a podcaster [with ‘At Last She Said It’], I use all the different names in speaking about my experiences and the organization. I feel reluctant to let anyone else define or redefine my lifetime of identity and experience.”
(Alyssa Tsuchiya via RNS) “At Last She Said It" by Cynthia Winward, left, and Susan Hinckley. Hinckley says she is "reluctant to let anyone else define or redefine my lifetime of identity and experience.”
Hinckley’s been “a Mormon forever. I’m also a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” she writes. “As a writer, I will never be on board with replacing one word with nine. As a Christian, I’m devoted to following Jesus, and the word disciple is more important to me than an organizational title. So I’m not a fan of this change, and I hope it fades.”
Will it, though? Or is the church just taking the long view — waiting for new generations who have never heard the word “Mormon”?
Latter-day Saint poet Marianne Hales has watched this battle play out.
“Such strong pushback on a nickname made us all seem like that kid who went by Joe all his life and then suddenly gets snippy about it in high school when he decides to go by Joseph,” she writes on social media. “We sound insufferable.”
Things have settled down. Organizations have changed their names, people have figured out how to do all the verbal gymnastics, Hales writes, “but it’s all still very stiff and formal.”
What the church and its members need is “something that is easy to say and highly recognizable,” she argues, “and ‘Christian’ doesn’t work because it needs to be more distinctive.”
“Linguistically, this is a mess,” Hales says, but she has faith that “eventually the powerful forces of language and innovation will win out.”
No telling, she writes, how long it will take.
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