It’s awards season again!! Time to recognize and celebrate the most-talked-about Mo’s and ex-Mo’s of 2025!!
As usual, we start with X-Mormon of the Year — for the X-Mormon who made the biggest splash in 2025!!
Just to review the guidelines: “X-Mormon of the Year” is the award for real-life actions or activism — not for content creation alone. It’s also not a lifetime achievement award. It’s for breaking into the real-world news cycle during the year in question (2025).
Every year people ask: “When is RFM going to win?” Well, he has won — plenty of Brodie Awards (see 2024 for example). If he wants to also win “X-Mormon of the Year”, then all he needs to do is make the news by getting excommunicated, like “Nemo the Mormon” did last year. 😉
Normally when I open these nominations I have at least an idea or two in mind for likely candidates, but this year I’ve got nothing. I don’t recall seeing any high-profile excommunications or other big LDS news stories.
Well, I guess there was one, but — in the interest of keeping this light and fun — please only nominate people who are currently alive.
So it looks like we’re really going to need help crowd-sourcing nominees this year. Anyone can nominate: just post your nominee in the comments below this post or on the corresponding reddit thread. (If you include a link to a relevant news story with your nomination, that would be very helpful!!!)
And remember, please save your nominations for favorite podcasters, YouTubers, artists, etc., for the Brodie Award nominations, which will begin next week. Thanks!!!!
Heather Gay, author of “Bad Mormon.”
Tim Ballard and for all the wrong reasons
Thanks for the nominations, everyone!!
We’ve got some good nominations on the corresponding reddit thread (linked above), so I will copy them here to keep them consolidated:
Alex Murray — It looks like he’s primarily a YouTuber, so I’ll probably add him to the Brodies nominations. However, if his church exit was sufficiently public, I’ll allow it here too.
Another nomination for Heather Gay. It would be cool if we had some nominees for something other than content creation, but since she started a new show in 2025 that has sufficient reach outside of the LDS-interest community, I’ll allow it.
Another nomination for Tim Ballard. He technically qualifies because he made the news in 2025 for not getting prosecuted. I’m still hesitant on whether this one should be allowed, though, since this award is not intended to be a booby-prize, it is intended to highlight positive achievements.
Floodlit.org for shining the light on sexual abuse within the CoJCoL-dS made the news in 2025 for shining the spotlight on Joseph Brent Walker.
Redditor Suspicious_Might_663 for uncovering evidence of CoJCoL-dS ownership of $92,510,000 in Staten Island property.
Popular LDS podcasters Valerie and Nathan Hamaker publicly resigned from the CoJCoL-dS in March of 2025 in response to being threatened with church discipline.