“I Wasn't the Only One”: Podcasting as Sociotechnical Infrastructure for Religious Deconstruction, Transition, and Reconfiguration in High-Demand Communities

We adopt the term “high-demand religion” to describe religious systems that place extensive demands on members’ time, identity, relationships, moral life, and interpretive authority. In Mormon and ex-Mormon discourse, the term overlaps with “high-cost” religion, which likewise emphasizes participation demands, behavioral expectations, social boundaries, and exit costs [40, 41]. Prior work shows leaving high-cost religions can involve belief, identity, relationships, and everyday life — producing experiences of constraint and liberation [5, 18, 40]. Mormon disaffiliation often involves renegotiating belonging, authority, relationships, and self-understanding [3, 28, 50].

Prior work examines how Mormon identity is negotiated through online discourse, institutional authority, ambivalence, dissent, and community formation [4, 50]. Research on ex-Christian communities similarly shows how digital spaces support identity reconstruction beyond believer/nonbeliever binaries [49]. CSCW scholars examined online exit narratives from non-religious high-commitment communities across cognitive, emotional, social, and identity dimensions [17, 36].

Together, this work frames religious transition as an ongoing process of narration, reflection, and identity reconfiguration. We extend this framing to podcasting as a site where listeners encounter exit narratives, test interpretations, and make sense of their pasts and possible futures.

Sensemaking examines how people interpret disruption while renegotiating identity, trust, and institutional relationships [52]. CSCW extends this perspective to collective interpretations of contested events, including "conspiracy talk," disinformation, and collaboratively constructed “deep stories” [24, 37, 48]. Therefore, we position religious transition as collaborative sensemaking around a changing identity.

Religious identity remains less documented in HCI/CSCW [9, 54, 55], although religious transition raises familiar questions for the field around identity work, institutional relationships, selective visibility, mediated community, and changing relationships to institutions [41]. Prior work frames identity as something people manage in relation to audiences, expectations, and social settings [19]. CSCW extends this to how sociotechnical systems mediate identity work, including how people negotiate self-understanding, visibility, belonging, and social recognition through online communities and media systems. Research on LGBTQ+ communities shows how online spaces can support identity exploration, recognition, and recovery through narratives, selective visibility, and mediated community [15]. More recent work demonstrates how algorithmically curated, multimodal platforms like TikTok shape identity negotiation through routine encounters with affirming, contradictory, or exclusionary content [27, 45]. Others demonstrate that people navigating prolonged life transitions develop new forms of identity awareness by connecting with sociotechnical and human infrastructures to help them interpret unfamiliar norms and reconstruct a coherent sense of self [43]. Along with identity work, literature on life disruptions has focused on rebuilding routines toward a “new normal” and using platforms as “social transition machinery” during liminal identity change [20, 29].

We build on this literature by examining religious transition as a form of identity work mediated through podcast listening as a transitional infrastructure.

As much identity work relies on routine and critical infrastructuring [42, 44], we engage with infrastructure literature. Infrastructure is relational: emerging through use, shaping what is (not) possible, and requiring ongoing work [16, 39, 47]. From this, we define sociotechnical infrastructure as the relational arrangement of tools, practices, routines, narratives, and social connections through which people accomplish difficult forms of inquiry and identity work [1, 10, 15].

Podcasting differs from the text-based platforms often emphasized in CSCW research [27]. Prior work describes contemporary podcasting as "platformed listening," shaped by binge listening, recommendations, playlists, cross-device consumption, and media ecologies spanning multiple modalities and everyday routines [26]. Podcasting research also emphasizes trust, intimacy, and parasocial connection. Hosts can cultivate credibility and authenticity via recurring relationships embedded in listeners’ routines, while podcasts often blur information, storytelling, journalism, and trust [8, 51, 53]. We use this understanding to frame MSP as a sociotechnical infrastructure through which listeners renegotiate identities shaped by high-demand religious contexts.

Since 2005, MSP has been a visible part of Mormon and ex-Mormon discourse, centering long-form stories about faith crises, institutional distrust, historical controversy, identity reconstruction, and ex-Mormon life [32]. Its visibility makes it a productive case for our study.

This study's scope was shaped by the first author's personal experience with Mormon belonging and disaffiliation. This aided contextual knowledge and interpretation of religious language, institutional structure, social expectations, and identity negotiation. We treated this proximity as an analytic resource while using reflexive thematic analysis to support careful interpretation [6, 7]. Reflexive practices included memoing and consistently checking study protocols with mentors without this context to balance analyst identity with analytic rigor [2, 13, 14]. Additionally, to preserve nuance, we avoided treating Mormonism, disaffiliation, or MSP listenership as singular or normative experiences as participants described a range of listening experiences and transitions from continued belief, ambivalence, partial affiliation, or departure.

Participants were recruited via MSP-affiliated media channels. Before recruitment, the first author had background conversations with MSP host Dr. John Dehlin to explain the project. Dehlin shared recruitment materials on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, and other community-facing platforms. More than 600 people expressed interest. We used purposive sampling to recruit listeners with varied relationships to Mormonism, selecting participants who could provide information-rich accounts of MSP listening during religious transition [34]. The final sample included 26 participants: active, true-believing members (n = 2), progressive believers (n = 2), physically-in-mentally-out members (“PIMOs”) (n = 11), former members (n = 6), and listeners who had never been Mormon (“NeverMos”) (n = 5). We treated these categories as positions in relation to Mormonism rather than fixed stages of a single transition. Participants varied in age, race, gender, degree of listening, and current relationship to Mormon belief and community, allowing us to examine how podcast listening operated differently across forms of belief, ambivalence, disaffiliation, and outsider interest.

We conducted 26 semi-structured, one-hour Zoom interviews. The interview examined participants’ pathways into MSP listenership, listening practices, experiences of doubt or deconstruction, and changing relationships to identity, community, and Mormonism. The semi-structured format allowed participants to narrate their transitions in their own terms while maintaining consistency across core topics, consistent with past CSCW research examining identity work [15, 27, 45].

We analyzed interviews using reflexive thematic analysis [6, 7]. The first author coded transcripts inductively and iteratively compared codes and themes across interviews. Codes were then refined into more than 30 active codes. The first author discussed emerging codes and themes with senior coauthors throughout the analytic process, using these conversations to refine theme boundaries, test interpretations, and start developing theories. Over time, infrastructure became a core lens for understanding how participants used MSP during institutional and epistemic transition.

Participants described MSP as useful for inquiry they considered socially risky, emotionally difficult, or institutionally discouraged. Unlike public social media participation, podcast listening allowed difficult questions to remain private and portable, folded into commuting, working, cleaning, and other routine tasks. Participants also described MSP's extensive catalog of long-form episodes, often exceeding two hours and organized by topic, guest, or controversy as making specific questions and experiences easier to locate and explore [33]. One participant explained:

"[the podcast] is breaking down our whole construct of religion and God and life, and we're just actually driving to work...At the beginning, I would actually watch the videos...[As I got] more used [to] what was going on with me, it became more like: I want to keep listening, but I also have other things to do, so it's just going to go along with me." — P14

Long-form podcasting offered a slower alternative to short-form content. Listeners spent hours with hosts, guests, and panelists discussing personal history, institutional conflict, family dynamics, and Mormon transition. Notably, MSP was rarely described as the sole catalyst of deconstruction. Instead, it sat within a broader ecology of resources, including Reddit, TikTok, YouTube, LDS-related essays, books, and private conversations. The podcast helped organize scattered questions, sources, and emotions into narrative encounters listeners could revisit during uncertainty.

These listening practices suggest participants managed the visibility of their inquiry by incorporating podcast listening into everyday routines. For MSP listeners, privacy depended on portability, asynchronous access, and ability to move inquiry into ordinary routines without making that inquiry socially visible. This extends contextual privacy approaches [31] which emphasize that appropriate information flows depend on social norms, roles, and purposes within specific contexts [11, 31]. It also resonates with recent work on reproductive privacy, where users navigating sensitive or legally fraught information needs engage in collective privacy sensemaking and threat modeling to manage risks around disclosure, surveillance, and care-seeking [30, 46]. Our findings, alongside current literature, surface an opportunity for systems that support sensitive sensemaking to provide low-friction, low-visibility engagement modes to allow users to explore difficult information before they are ready to disclose or participate publicly.

Detailed personal narratives helped listeners reinterpret experiences they had understood as isolated, morally defective, or personal failures. Hearing others articulate familiar tensions disrupted that isolation and gave them vocabulary for making sense of doubt, frustration, and transition.

"A lot of people say... ‘Mormon Stories saved me,’ and I would say it did save me...I couldn't put a finger on what my mental health was experiencing... [Deconstruction] is very disorienting... It was so hard for me to think ‘How could I ever let go of this?’ But...having stories of people saying, ‘I was doing everything. I was a temple worker. I went on a mission. I got married in the temple. And then it just crumbles,’ helped me to understand that this wasn't something I could fully control." — P19

Participants also described stories as doing interpretive work that institutional discourse or critical analysis could not. Stories appeared to place belief, doubt, family strain, shame, gender expectations, and institutional conflict within shared lived experience. This helped participants reinterpret their own histories. Several contrasted MSP stories with institutional or apologetic materials, which often felt controlled, simplified, or emotionally constrained, while MSP interviews felt open, vulnerable, uncertain, and willing to sustain criticism.

“I realized... John Dehlin has been more honest with me than the church has ever been.” — P14

Stories also helped participants imagine alternative possible futures, including life after Mormonism, nuanced belief, mixed-faith relationships, and other forms of spirituality and community. These imagined futures went beyond providing participants with validation to offering models of how a coherent life could continue during and after their deconstruction

"I wasn't the only one...These were the smartest people I had ever heard having the same stories as me. So it was just super validating, like: okay, I'm not a lazy learner. I have an army behind me. I have John Dehlin. No matter what my family says, I have these people who can validate me." — P5

This emphasis on stories surfaces opportunities for interventions supporting institutional transition to consider information access and emotional recognition as connected needs. For participants, stories helped make contested information more interpretable, emotionally manageable, and socially meaningful. This builds on work showing that stories organize collective sensemaking around institutional distrust and contested realities, including “deep stories” that help people interpret felt realities, social worlds, and perceived (actual and potential) losses [21, 37, 38]. This suggests narrative may complement or even precede fact-based and literacy interventions. Systems supporting identity transition may need to provide scaffolding rather than prioritize retention, helping users find recognition, build interpretive confidence, expand support networks, and cultivate autonomy over time. This aligns with prior CSCW work on technologies that foster independence by expanding support networks and reducing long-term reliance.

We use transitional infrastructure to describe sociotechnical arrangements that support movement through periods of identity instability and institutional change [16, 39, 47]. Our concept builds on prior work regarding how people in prolonged disruptions actively construct and adapt infrastructures via evolving routines and practices that support resilience over time [42], while emphasizing how users’ relationships to infrastructures change as institutional transition unfolds.

Listener engagement with MSP was often most intense during crisis or rapid deconstruction. Several participants described periods of heavy listening, sometimes consuming multiple long episodes per day while trying to understand fear, grief, loneliness, anger, confusion, family strain, and major life decisions. In this stage, MSP helped participants make sense of experiences they could not easily discuss in church, family, or local community settings.

“There's an instigating event... with the Church, your own distress, and the truth claims. It hits a pinnacle, and then you start working things out, and it goes down.” — P26

Many participants described a changing relationship to MSP. We use “graduating” to name their reduced need for intensive engagement, not a complete disengagement. Some participants continued to use MSP selectively, some shifted to shorter clips or adjacent media, and others returned when new questions, conflicts, or institutional events made it useful again. One participant described a “bell curve” of engagement, where an instigating event creates intense need, followed by gradual decline as listeners begin “working things out.” Another described trying to move from treating the church as “everything” toward seeing it as an institution they had “outgrown,” but still found themselves pulled back to MSP when “energy” returned to Mormon-related questions. In this sense, graduating from MSP meant that the podcast became less central, not irrelevant.

This finding suggests that transitional media systems may be valuable precisely because they support changing relationships between users and infrastructure over time. Participants often relied heavily on MSP during periods of epistemic disruption, then gradually depended on it less as they developed new routines, relationships, and interpretive frameworks. This complicates engagement models that treat continued use as a primary value. Systems supporting identity transition may need to be scaffolding rather than retention based: helping users find recognition, build interpretive confidence, expand support networks, and cultivate autonomy over time. This resonates with prior CSCW work on designing technologies that foster independence by expanding support networks and reducing long-term reliance on the technology itself [22, 23, 25]. Successful transitional infrastructure remains accessible when needed, supports return during new moments of uncertainty, and becomes less central as users develop other ways to make sense of their lives.