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

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

So what happens when a church changes its name and old adherents continue to use the original term in ways they may not like?

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

The 200-year-old church stopped using the word “Mormon” to describe itself or its members in 2019 after the church leader announced that God had commanded him to drop the title. Now only The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or “the church” or “The Church of Jesus Christ” would be correct.

The then president, Russell M Nelson, told members that he had “imprinted on my mind the importance of the name the Lord had revealed for his church” and that continuing to use the word “Mormon” would be “a great victory for Satan”.

“We’re not changing names. We’re correcting a name,” Nelson added. “Some marketers change names hoping to be more successful; that’s not our goal. We’re correcting a mistake that’s been around for ages.”

As with any rebranding, the naming change spread throughout the organization. Since 1929, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, as it has been known, was located in downtown Salt Lake City. renamed Tabernacle Choir in Temple Square. The songs remained the same. The church’s “I’m Mormon” advertising campaign and the Mormon Channel were also changed.

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

“The case is an extension of the church’s policies that emphasize moving away from the monikers of Mormon and Mormonism,” said Patrick Mason of Claremont University, an expert on the Latter-day Saint movement. “Church leadership and members really want to emphasize the Christian good faith of the church, and the Church of Jesus and Latter-day Saints signals that in a way that Mormon and Mormonism do not.”

The question, he says, “addresses the perennial question of whether the church can be included in the broader Christian family, a question we have seen recently litigated in the Department of Defense’s classification of chaplains.” So this is a live issue for the church and its members. “They feel that strongly and really want to emphasize that Jesus is at the center of this practice.”

In the lawsuit, the church accused Dehlin and Mormon Stories of “intentionally and knowingly” displaying copyrighted images, including Dehlin agreeing to alter the images, dropping the logo’s light rays and replacing the dark blue font the church used with orange.

The church alleges that the podcaster forced it to take legal action after Dehlin refused to “take steps to adequately resolve the confusion.”

The timing of the church’s lawsuit is intriguing, Mason notes, because although Dehlin’s criticism of the church and the tone of his podcast were a thorn in the side of the church, the name of the podcast did not raise any obvious concerns.

“It makes sense in the broader context, but one wonders why now and not five or eight years ago,” he said. “The irony here, as many people have pointed out, is that the church filed a lawsuit at the same time because it did not want to be associated with the term Mormon.”

Last week, Dehlin, who has a history of criticizing the church, said in a legal response that he and his organization had not backed down, accusing the church of weaponizing trademark and copyright laws to silence him and his podcast.

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

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

The church is known for resorting to secular lawsuits against former members, avoiding settling disputes with current members.

Dehlin, a former graduate of Brigham Young University old contact by church leaders in 2015 for debating “the nature of our Heavenly Father and the divinity of Jesus Christ,” making statements that the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham are “works of fraud and fiction,” and denying that the church is the “true church with power and authority from God.”

You have Dehlin requested His support for same-sex marriage and women’s equality in the church also influenced the church’s decision. The church disputes that claim, but a 2017 leak of internal church documents showed that Dehlin was on a church list of people and organizations that church leaders felt were “leading people away from the gospel.”

Others argued that the action of suing Dehlin and Mormon Stories would draw more attention to the term “Mormon”, which the church wanted to change if it remained silent. Period, Dehlin’s long counterargument “it belongs to the people – including members of the more than 400 different Mormon sects now present across the country, tracing their heritage back to Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism.”

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

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

Similar efforts to move away from “Mormon” occurred in 1982, 2001 and 2011. In both, the Book of Mormon and the Way of Mormon remained influential. But those efforts may be intensifying because Mormon is also used to describe splinter or fundamentalist groups that practice polygamy.

“This is an ongoing challenge for the church,” says Mason. “There are so many Netflix, Hulu, and other kinds of shows about fundamentalist Mormons that the church really wants to differentiate itself and stand out from other groups that are also called Mormons.

“It’s a bit of a tricky business, and especially at a time when TV shows are turning to the salacious and scandalous aspects of Mormonism. But the church wants to define itself, and one way to do that is to highlight the full and correct name.”