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

The Salt Lake Temple in Utah. Photograph: Rick Bowmer/AP View image in fullscreen The Salt Lake Temple in Utah. Photograph: Rick Bowmer/AP Analysis Good-faith lawsuit? LDS church in fight with podcaster over Mormon name Edward Helmore Church sues excommunicated member over Mormon Stories podcast but John Dehlin says name free for all to use 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 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 says, speaks 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 D