SALT LAKE CITY, UT — In a historic event that experts are calling “baffling” and “maybe a prank,” the B.H. Roberts Foundation-affiliated apologetics website Mormonr.org received its first-ever web visit yesterday after a confused journalist accidentally clicked on a link while googling “Brigham Young University in Autumn.” Probably due to the mispelling of “Autumn” the journalist instead got mormonr.org’s rushed explanation about Brigham Young’s Adam-God theory (his claim that Adam is in fact God the Father), and how it’s also totally normal for Prophets to have such zany opinions!
The website, created with the noble goal of answering “hard questions” by first deciding to be faithful no matter what, has been online since 2019. However, despite being optimized for search engines by worthy members and filled with detailed responses, the website can’t keep up on important topics like “Did they cure Joseph Smith’s Syphilis Through a Laying on of Hands?” and “Why did God forget about Black people until 1978?”, and so traffic to the site has remained at a solid zero for five consecutive years.
Until now.
“Honestly, I just wanted to know if BYU’s got decidious trees on campus,” said The Bunion correspondent Greg Henders, who next found himself looking at an article teaser: ‘Why Brigham Young Can Be a Genocidal Monster and a Prophet At The Same Time. “At first I thought it was satire. Then I realized these people are actually serious. Every article ends with some version of ‘…and that’s why the Church is true in a world of complex facts.’ It’s like reading Mormon Quora if it were edited exclusively by emotionally exhausted seminary teachers.”
Mormonr.org claims to be a resource “for Latter-day Saints who want honest, scholarly answers without all the pesky faith crises.” The site is written in a tone best described as “social media employee trying to sanitize 19th-century prairie theologies in a cool way,” and features headers such as:
- ‘The Mountain Meadows Massacre: A Tragedy Perpetrated By Only The ‘Disobedient’ Mormons
- ‘Why the Book of Abraham’s Translation Isn’t Wrong, It’s Just Not Right in the Way You Think Translation Works’
- Nothing Illuminates Utah’s History of Slavery Like Gaslight
Perhaps the most confusing part is the target demographic, which appears to be… no one.
“I’m not sure who this is for,” said digital strategist Courtney Firth. “Neither the faithful members nor exmormons are googling ‘Was Joseph Smith a con man?’ hoping to find a thousand-word mental gymnastics routine. And the people who might google that are already halfway done reading Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History with a glass of wine. So it’s like an emergency exit door that opens into another burning room, but with more footnotes and cringey graphics from right-wing reddit.”
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The site’s analytics team, which consists of one BYU intern with a 2007 chromebook, confirmed that Henders’ visit triggered an internal Slack alert labeled “WE HAVE A LIVE ONE.” The alert was followed by the entire staff frantically refreshing Google Analytics and offering thoughts and prayers that he might click “Contact Us.”
He did not.
Despite the brief surge in traffic, Mormonr.org has since returned to its natural state of profound digital solitude, floating through cyberspace like the lost ten tribes, the three Nephites, or the Osmonds— occasionally seen, but mostly just speculated about.
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