"Victims Of Their Religious Beliefs"

Why 'The God Makers' Has Endured In the Evangelical Imagination

It had to have been 6th grade—maybe 7th?—when I first watched it. Someone rolled in a TV cart to the church youth room, popped in the VHS, and dimmed the lights like they were a substitute teacher about to Bill Nye the Science Guy their way through the day.

After a brief splash of static, the title screen appeared:

I was familiar with Mormonism, though only in the way evangelicals kids were in the ‘90s and early ‘00s: vaguely, suspiciously. My only real connection was a souvenir copy of the Book of Mormon I’d found years earlier on my grandfather’s bookshelf, wedged in between mechanical engineering textbooks and copies of National Geographic.

I was the member of a typical early-2000s youth group: half doctrine, half dodgeball, all End Times anxiety. Audio Adrenaline in the background when parents were around; P.O.D. when they weren’t. We were warned about secular music, Ouija boards, and cults.

Especially cults.

So, The God Makers hit like a horror film wrapped in a sermon. Animated demons. Secret rituals. Claims that Mormons believe God lived on a planet near the star Kolob, that Jesus was a polygamist, and good Mormon men get to become gods of their own worlds and have lots of spirit babies with all their wives.

It felt scandalous, urgent… like we’d just been shown the Top Secret schemes of spiritual deception.

Looking back, I don’t remember the finer theological points. But I certainly remember how I felt. I was as much shocked as I was empowered. And, if I’m honest, I felt justified above all. I didn’t even really believe what I was suppose to as an evangelical, but at least I didn’t believe that. (“God, I thank You that I am not like the Mormons.”)

Fast-forward twenty-five years. An evangelical friend who knows I study Latter-day Saint history sent me the old animated clip from The God Makers on YouTube.

“Have you seen this?” they asked.

A thousand times, I thought.

That got me wondering: Why did The God Makers, a low-budget, sensationalistic exposé, find such a lasting place among evangelical churches from the 80s through today?

The God What-ers?

Ok, let’s back up.

If you’ve never had the pleasure—or the spiritual whiplash—of watching The God Makers, I don’t blame you. But in 80s and 90s evangelicalism, it was everywhere.

The original 1982 film, The God Makers, opens with a tone of emergency. (Fun fact: it premiered at John MacArthur’s church.) Narrated by Ed Decker—a former Latter-day Saint-turned-zealous-counter-cult-crusader—the film is part documentary, part docu-drama, part cartoon theology lesson. It claims to reveal what Mormon missionaries won’t tell you until it’s too late. The real story behind the white shirts, bright smiles, and family values.

There’s a live-action framing device—an earnest young man questioning his Mormon faith—and then, infamously, the cartoon. That animated segment did all the theological heavy lifting: Kolob, Elohim, spirit wives, secret handshakes, Jesus and his kid brother Lucifer. Watching it as an evangelical teen, I didn’t understand how any of that fit together. I just knew it was weird, and weird meant wrong.

That’s what captured my attention. Not the logic, nor the doctrine… not even the danger. It was the strangeness. Mormonism wasn’t just a little off. According to The God Makers, it was something else entirely. A cult.

Maybe the cult.

If The God Makers was trying to steer evangelical kids like me away from Mormonism, it had done its job. For a season, anyway. Years later, I got curious. I read more, especially the Book of Mormon. I spent time with LDS missionaries (and even a bishop) who tried hard. But to their deep frustration, the more I listened, the more I leaned into historic Christian orthodoxy instead. Still, The God Makers gave me more than nuance. It gave me VHS certainty.

Back to the original question: What’s the reason behind The God Makers staying power in evangelicalism? I think there’s at least four reasons why.

From The God Makers, Joseph Smith delicately handles 40–60 lbs of gold like its a stack of pancakes.

1. Exposés Make Viewers Feel Like an Insider

Christian exposés of Mormonism aren’t novel. They’ve been around since practically the beginning, e.g., Eber D. Howe’s Mormonism Unvailed (1834). Barely a generation has passed without a new one. What set The God Makers apart wasn’t that it was an exposé. It was how it exposed, and when.

The film was framed masterfully as VIP sneak behind the curtain, promising to unmask a secretive organization. The structure—former Mormons revealing shocking truths—made viewers feel like insiders. Promotional materials promised to penetrate a ‘veil of secrecy’ and reveal a ‘hidden worldwide agenda.’

And the content delivered: temple garments (“holy Mormon underwear”), secret rituals reenacted, doctrines of godhood, celestial marriage, and eternal sex. It wasn’t just the strangeness. It was the suggestion that Latter-day Saints were hiding it all. For evangelicals already hardwired to value truth and reject deception (see 2 Timothy 4:3–4), that made it feel spiritually urgent. The film didn’t just inform. It gave us permission to be suspicious.

Granted, back then, the LDS Church was much more coy about its unique history and beliefs—it was ‘anti-Mormon’ to talk about seer stones and temple rituals. The God Makes didn’t fabricate those ideas wholesale. But the framing is deliberately lurid, exaggerated, and orphaned from context in a way that the filmmakers knew would shape evangelical perception less around understand and more around fear. They froze our impressions of Mormonism at the most sensational level, which is why the film comes across so cringy, even by 80s standards. And even as the LDS Church has shifted in recent years—“I am a Mormon” campaign, more transparency, changes to the endowment, etc—many evangelicals stayed frozen in their God Makers framework, not because their concerns about Mormonism are baseless, but because they hadn’t been challenged to revisit them with generosity, curiosity, or attention to change.

2. It Surfaced During Peak Satanic Panic

Second, think about the air The God Makers was breathing. The early 1980s were thick with fear, not just of cults like Jonestown, but of something closer to home. This was the dawn of the Satanic Panic.

Books like Michelle Remembers (1980) raised the alarm on purported Satanic ritual abuse, and prime-time specials ran with it. Talk shows warned of evil rituals in daycare basements. Suddenly, exorcism movies looked more like documentaries than horror fiction. The Dungeons & Dragons manual was lowkey a spell book, or at least that’s what I was told. And who didn’t play Pink Floyd backward to hear devilish whispers?

Layer onto that the surge of End Times fervor, sparked by Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth and edged into overdrive by books like 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988. (He was wrong, btw.) A wave of apocalyptic preaching swept through the 80s and 90s. For many evangelicals, the clock was ticking down. Deception wasn’t just a spiritual danger; rather, it was a sign that the world was hurtling toward the rise of Antichrist. And if Christ was coming soon, you’d better not be caught following a cult when he showed up.

Into this atmosphere stepped The God Makers. Ed Decker linked Mormonism to the Satanic Panic by suggesting the name “Mormon” was linked to a demon called Mormo from Anton LaVey’s The Satanic Bible. And the temple rituals portrayed in the film were framed as occultic. So, for evangelicals already on edge about End Times deception, The God Makers didn’t just resonate with the moment—it amplified it.

3. For Many, It Was the First and Last Words on Mormonism

Third, and maybe most consequentially, The God Makers was the first introduction many evangelicals had to Mormonism.

There were other books, to be sure. Jerald and Sandra Tanner were busy researching and writing. Walter Martin was on the radio, and his Kingdom of the Cults was the gold standard. But The God Makers had something different: accessibility. It was visual and dramatic. And it circulated through trusted evangelical networks, screened in churches, stocked in Christian bookstores, backed by counter-cult ministries.

For many, it was the first time they learned that Mormonism taught a different view of God, that Joseph Smith had a controversial past, that temple rituals existed. The information was real—some of it exaggerated, some of it distorted—but the impact was undeniable. It gave people categories and language to understand Mormonism, and that left a massive imprint.

For those who never revisited the topic again, that first word was also the final one. So, when loved ones later asked about Mormonism, The God Makers became a trusted, go-to resource.

4. It Cemented the “Cult” Category for Mormonism

Finally, the film did what exposés are often designed to do: draw a line. And it did so with a single word… cult.

After Jonestown (1978), that word carried more than theological weight. It meant manipulation, control, and danger. The God Makers leaned into that. Not just doctrinal differences, but deception.

For evangelicals wrestling with the seeming wholesomeness of Mormon neighbors—their kindness, their morality, their family values—the film provided a framework. They may look Christian, but they’re not. They sound biblical, but they’re not. They’re the nicest cult on earth—a sentiment that echoes to this day.

And for evangelicals, who hold to a faith that defines itself by fidelity to the gospel of grace, that line clarified everything. The God Makers didn’t just inform; rather, it reinforced boundaries. It told evangelicals it wasn’t merely okay to keep their distance, it was righteous to do so.

From The God Makers, a very inaccurate depiction of Joseph Smith because we have the daguerreotype now.

Victims of Belief

The sequel, The God Makers II, came out in 1983. It’s lesser known, but even more sensational. The final minutes, though, are surprisingly subdued. After all the conspiracy, all the fear, the narrator offers a quiet appeal.

He calls Mormons “victims of their religious beliefs.” That line has stuck with me.

Because beneath all the panic and polemic, that was the core message: not that Mormons were the enemy, but that they were deceived. Trapped, and in need of rescue.

If The God Makers warned evangelicals away from Mormonism, The God Makers II encouraged us toward it, however awkwardly. And maybe that’s why The God Makers still lingers in the evangelical imagination. It wasn’t just about exposing error; rather, it was about protecting people. It played to our love of truth, yes, but also, at its best moments, to our love of neighbor, in the way evangelicals were trained how.

But here’s the turn I didn’t expect: watching that old cartoon again, I realized that in some ways, we evangelicals became what we accused. Not victims of Mormon belief, but victims of our own. Of our need to know we’re right. Of our suspicion dressed up as discernment. Of our preference for distance over dialogue.

The more I’ve come to know Latter-day Saints—their stories, their practices, their hopes—the less room there’s been in me for the kind of fear that once animated my faith. What’s left is not a loss of conviction, but the quiet realization that people are always more than their labels, and that love, if it’s real, can hold the weight of real disagreement.

And that, I think, is where the caricatures finally fall away.

I often tell evangelicals that there’s no wrong questions to ask a Latter-day Saint; there’s just wrong ways to ask.

The God Makers asked the wrong way. Not because the questions were unfounded, but because fear makes a poor teacher, and an even worse neighbor.

📘 Coming Soon: 40 Questions About Mormonism

If you’ve appreciated this essay, you’ll love my forthcoming book, 40 Questions About Mormonism (Kregel Academic, this coming winter). It’s written for traditional Christians who want clear, charitable, and biblically faithful answers to the most common questions about the Latter-day Saint faith and tradition.