Good-faith lawsuit? LDS church in fight with podcaster over Mormon name
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Trademark changes and copyright infringement disputes take many forms. Dunkin’ Donuts changed its name to Dunkin’ because Donuts did not suggest the vigorous, on-the-go attitude the coffee company wants to project.
But what happens when a church changes its name, but former adherents continue to use the original term in ways it may not like?
In April, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, better known as the Mormon church, filed a lawsuit against John Dehlin, an excommunicated sixth-generation member, to prevent him from calling his podcast Mormon Stories and branding it in ways that mimic copyrighted church branding with the “intent to capitalize on and increase confusion”.
The 200-year old church stopped using “Mormon” to describe itself or its members in 2019, when the church’s leader announced that the Lord had commanded it drop the title. Only the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or “the church” or “Church of Jesus Christ” would now be correct.
Then president Russell M Nelson told members that the “Lord has impressed upon my mind the importance of the name he has revealed for his church” and that continuing to use “Mormon” would be “a major 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 point. We’re correcting an error that’s crept in over the ages.”
The nomenclature change, as any rebranding might, rippled through the organization. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir, as it was known since 1929, in downtown Salt Lake City, was renamed the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square. The songs remained the same. The church’s “I’m a 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 continued use of the now-abandoned name, arguing that the church largely controls the word “Mormon” because it had long used the term and remains associated with it.
“The lawsuit is part is an extension of the church’s policies to emphasize the move away from the nicknames Mormon and Mormonism,” said Patrick Mason at Claremont University, who specializes in the study of the Latter-day Saint movement. “The church leadership and membership really want to emphasize the church’s Christian bona fides, and the Church of Jesus and Latter-day Saints points to that in a way that Mormon and Mormonism does not.”
The issue, he said, spoke to “a perennial question of whether the church can be included within the broader Christian family and one that we saw litigated recently in the Department of Defense’s categorization of chaplains. So, this is a live issue for the church and its members. They feel it acutely and really want to emphasize that Jesus is at the heart of its practice.”
In the lawsuit, the church accused Dehlin and Mormon Stories of “intentionally and willfully” displaying copyright imagery, including after Dehlin agreed to alter the imagery, dropped the logo’s light rays and swapped the navy blue font used by the church for orange.
The church claims that the podcaster forced it to take legal action after Dehlin refused to “take the actions needed to sufficiently address the confusion”.
The timing of the church’s lawsuit is curious, Mason points out, because while Dehlin’s criticism of the church and the tone of his podcast has been a thorn in the side of the church, the name of the podcast had not been an overt concern.
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Content retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/28/lds-church-mormon-lawsuit.
