Kintsugi Heroes
Lynn Smith Gregory · 51 min
Born into Mormon royalty as the great-great-grand niece of Joseph Smith, Lynn Smith Gregory risked losing her entire family and identity to pursue truth — and found a deeper spirituality on the other side.
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Lynn Smith Gregory grew up as the great-great-grandniece of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church, in a family held as Mormon royalty. Her identity was built on this connection, but so was the pressure to be perfect. Her father was strict and physically abusive; her mother stayed on the sidelines. When Lynn went to Utah State University instead of Brigham Young University by chance, she took a Bible literature class from a non-Mormon professor who challenged her to examine other historical accounts of Joseph Smith. What she found shattered everything. Scholars had documented that Joseph Smith practiced polygamy with girls as young as 14, married the wives of men he sent away on missions, and was fundamentally not the man the church had taught her he was. At 19, Lynn moved overnight from belief to atheism, terrified by the loss of her identity, family, and the meaning of life itself.
She told her family and the church leadership she no longer believed, then left Utah for New York City before her graduate program even began. In the city during a personal crisis, Lynn experienced what she describes as a spiritual moment: a sudden, undeniable feeling of unconditional love and connection to something greater than herself. This shifted everything. She spent years breaking every rule the Mormon Church had forbidden, from coffee to premarital sex, eventually becoming part of the Studio 54 scene in 1980s New York. But she was running from trauma, not healing it. Therapy became her turning point, giving her tools to understand both her dysfunctional family and the structure of the church itself.
Lynn found her way back to her siblings by offering to photograph their Mormon weddings, taking a role outside the temple where she was not permitted. Over time, with work and patience, her family opened. She now helps others navigate religious trauma and family estrangement, drawing on what she learned: healing requires both a therapist and a community of people who understand, realistic expectations about what a dysfunctional family can offer, and the willingness to find common ground where it exists. Her spirituality today is not tied to any religion, but to serving others from a place of fullness rather than desperation.
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