Pre-publication manuscript · Substack → Book Vol. I · May MMXXVI

Unified Field Theory of Mormon Theology

The same thing has been lost and recovered and lost again since Adam — and Joseph Smith was the last man to get close enough to touch it before he was killed, and we now have the tools to finish what he started.

She grew up in the church. She believed it completely. She has done enough research to know the institution has serious problems. But she has not been able to let go of Christ — not the correlation committee version, the real one. She has read the critics. She has read the apologists. Neither has spoken to her.

Diego Lucero May 2026
01

01 · The Question

Can we recover Joseph Smith's unifying theology using the analytical tools available to us right now?

The question is not whether Joseph Smith's theology was true. The question is whether it was complete — and whether the incompleteness was his, or was introduced after him.

The record says it was introduced after him. The tools to prove that have only existed for a generation. This project is the proof of work.

02 · The Framework

Closed System (Thermodynamics / Type I)

No exchange with environment. Maximum entropy inevitable. A closed system receives no input and produces no output. Every living organism in this state is spending itself into disorder. Righteousness is thermodynamically impossible here.

Consumptive Open (Thermodynamics / Type II)

Receives from environment. Returns disorder. An open system that takes in more than it gives back. The natural man. The institutional narcissist at scale. Entropy exported outward by default or by design.

Productive Open (Thermodynamics / Type III)

Receives. Converts. Returns surplus. The negentropic system. Produces more than it consumes. Exports order rather than disorder. Christ is the maximum expression of this orientation. The Salt Principle describes how it works.

Entropy Negentropy
System
02

02 · The Thesis

Joseph Smith's original theology was a unifying project. Brigham Young's was a separating one. The difference is not a matter of emphasis. It is structural.

Joseph was trying to recover what Jesus recovered. Which was what Moses recovered. Which was what Adam originally taught his family.

DISPENSATIONAL RECURSION — each head of a dispensation runs the same recovery algorithm: stripping accumulated drift, resurfacing the original theology for the era and people who need it. The motion is always backward toward a source, never forward toward novelty.

Joseph got further than anyone since Jesus. Then he was killed, and his work was incomplete.

Brigham Young did not continue that project. He cherry-picked the elements of Joseph's teaching that leaned toward separation — the parts where Joseph explained why other traditions had gone wrong — and amplified those specifically, because separation is useful for a man consolidating power. The result was not a different leadership style. It was a different theology. That theology became structural. It became the DNA of modern mainstream LDS culture.

The UFT audits it out. What remains is a theology that connects to broader Christianity rather than separates from it. A theology that is, at its core, about Christ.

ThesisVisual Aid 02

Dispensational Recursion

A timeline mapping of successive restorations and structural deviations.

Trunk & Covenants
Brigham · Divergent

Adam (First Dispensation)

The original theology given whole. Every recovery since is a return to this — not a progression beyond it.

Enoch (City of Zion)

The only community to achieve full negentropy before the capstone. The standard against which every subsequent community is measured.

Melchizedek (Priest-King of Salem)

Without father, without mother. The mysterious bridge across the silence between Enoch and Abraham.

Abraham (Covenant Recovered)

The blessing intended for all families of the earth — not for one tribe. The universality of the original theology is explicit here.

Moses (Baptized into Moses)

Paul names the structural identity — same covenant architecture in 1 Corinthians 10.

Christ (The Recovery Algorithm Incarnate)

Maximum negentropic expression. The trunk resurfaces. Not a new theology — the original one, embodied.

Joseph Smith (Work Interrupted)

Got further than anyone since Jesus. The restored theology was a unifying project — not a separating one. The work was interrupted before completion.

Brigham Young (Structural Deviation)

Brigham Young did not continue Joseph's project. He cherry-picked the elements that leaned toward separation and amplified them, resulting in a different, separating theology.

03

03 · The Framework

Six instruments. Each one independent. All pointing at the same law.

This is not a faith crisis memoir. It is not a deconstruction project. It is a forensic recovery effort — and it uses a specific set of tools.

Thermodynamics / Physics

The Second Law as Moral Diagnostic

Sin is not a behavior problem. It is an energy economics problem. Every closed system trends toward maximum disorder — entropy. Righteousness is the deliberate imposition of order on a chaotic system — negentropy. The question "is this aligned with God?" becomes a falsifiable test: does this produce more than it consumes, preserve what it builds, and export the surplus? Or does it extract, decay, and collapse?

This framework is not a metaphor. It is the actual diagnostic.

Dispensational Recursion

The Recovery Algorithm

Every head of a dispensation was not inventing a new religion. Each one was running the same recovery algorithm — stripping accumulated drift and resurfacing the original theology for the era and people who needed it. Adam. Melchizedek. Abraham. Moses. Christ. Joseph Smith. The chain is not a progression of increasingly correct theologies. It is the same theology, recovered again and again.

Paul named it in 1 Corinthians 10: the covenant at the Red Sea was structurally identical to baptism into Christ. Not analogous. Identical.

Forensic Epistemology

Primary Sources Beat Everything

The Succession Crisis. The early sermons. The 19th-century periodicals. The raw record tells a different story than the institutional narrative. We now have the tools to read that record at a scale that was impossible before — AI-assisted OCR, full-text search across archives, first-ever transcripts of documents that hadn't been readable since they were printed.

We are the first generation that can actually do this work at depth. The question is whether we will.

Systems Thinking

The Gospel as a Diagnosable System

The gospel is a system. A system is repeatable, produces consistent results, and can be diagnosed when it fails. The framework throughout this book is not decoration — it is the argument. If the system is producing entropic output, the system has a bug. Find the bug, fix the bug.

Software engineers already know how to do this. What changes here is the domain.

Vaknin Diagnostic

Malignant Narcissism at Institutional Scale

Sam Vaknin's framework for malignant narcissism — developed through decades of clinical and autobiographical research — provides the diagnostic vocabulary for what Brigham Young introduced into Mormon institutional culture after Joseph's death. This is not name-calling. It is pattern recognition. The grandiosity, the pathological deception, the extraction of narcissistic supply from subordinates, the rewriting of history to center the self — these are not character flaws. They are a clinical structure with predictable downstream consequences.

The UFT documents the institutional delta. The companion project, Brigham Young's Flying Monkeys, applies the full forensic record.

Mises Praxeology

Human Action Has a Discoverable Structure

Ludwig von Mises's praxeology — the study of human action as a structure that is discoverable, repeatable, and falsifiable regardless of who applies it — is baked into the methodology of this entire project. The Austrian Business Cycle Theory, mapped onto Mormon institutional history, produces a specific and testable prediction about what happens when a centralized authority distorts the theological price signals a community uses to allocate its spiritual resources.

The same misallocation pattern that produces economic booms and busts produces theological ones.

04

04 · Discoveries

What the instruments surface when you actually run them.

Eight discoveries the book makes that most readers have never encountered — regardless of how much they have read.

DiscoveriesVisual Aid 04

The Convergence Field

Adam's theology was a literal description of how consciousness organizes matter.
Mapped • Vedic & Sufi
Mapped • Taoist & Navajo
Mapped • Hebrew & Pauline

Convergence Field Traditions Checklist

  • Vedic (nishkama karma): Action without attachment to outcome. The PRODUCTIVE orientation expressed in Sanskrit thousands of years before thermodynamics.
  • Hebrew Mystical (lishmah): For its own sake. The original architecture mapped in mystical notation.
  • Taoist (wu wei): Subtract misalignment until you move with the law. Minimum-entropy action.
  • Pauline (2 Corinthians 3): The mirror metaphor. Structural identity and systemic transformation.
  • Sufi (mahabbah): Love as an orientation, not a feeling. The surplus exported upward, nothing hoarded.
  • Navajo / Diné (k'e · hózhó): Relational system obligating care across generations. Beauty and balance as a physical consequence of right relationship.
  • Restoration (D&C 93:28): Light and truth acting independently in the sphere in which God placed it. Agency as an energetic state.
Tradition
Named Signal
Recently Mapped
Unnamed Trace
Continuing Signal
Orphaned Terminus
Hover · Click to replay
Discovery 01

The Near-Industrial Salt Economy of Temple Liturgy

The Temple in Jerusalem consumed salt at near-industrial scale — not as seasoning, but as a covenantal preservative applied to every sacrifice, every grain offering, every covenant transaction. The Mishnaic tractate Menachot documents the quantities. Matthew 5:13 is not a motivational metaphor. It is a direct citation of Temple covenant theology.

Discovery 02

The Twin Serpents in the Debir

The debir — the Holy of Holies — originally contained two serpent figures flanking the throne of God: one representing the entropy that entered through the Garden, one representing the Nehushtan lifted up in the wilderness. Hezekiah smashed the Nehushtan. The Deuteronomists rewrote the debir. The binary was collapsed. Jesus restored it in John 3:14 — reaching back past every reform to name what had been removed.

Discovery 03

The Babel Fork as Hard Fork of the Human Codebase

Genesis 11 is not a story about pride. God's observation — "nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do" — is a structural assessment of unified humanity's capability ceiling. The scattering was a governor, not a punishment. The capstone of the UFT maps the Restoration as the merge resolution: not deleting other people's code, but reading it, understanding what it was trying to accomplish, and building something that runs because it finally includes everyone.

Discovery 04

Seven Independent Traditions, One Law

Vedic nishkama karma. Sufi mahabbah. The Tao Te Ching's chapter on subtraction. Navajo k'é and hózhó. Lehi's tree of life. Paul's mirror metaphor in 2 Corinthians 3. The Genesis two-tree synthesis recovered by Rabbi David Fohrman. Seven traditions. Four continents. Three thousand years of independent development. The same two orientations. The same consequences for each. When that many independent instruments point at the same thing — that is not coincidence. That is signal.

Discovery 05

The FATE Sequence Exploit on Human Hardware

Focus → Authority → Tribe → Emotion. The mammalian brain, encountering this sequence under the right conditions, does not fire a skepticism reflex. It completes it. Stanley Milgram's 1961 obedience experiments showed that 100% of participants exceeded 250 volts and 67% went all the way — against the predictions of professional psychiatrists who expected fewer than 1 in 1,000 to comply. The gap between predicted and actual behavior is the number every person in the middle has to sit with. The institutional church ran this sequence. So did the internet. The UFT is the internal firewall the external apparatus was supposed to provide.

Discovery 06

The Second Naiveté

Paul Ricoeur named it in 1960: the First Naiveté is the faith you had before the research. The Desert of Criticism is what comes after — the long, disorienting period of not knowing what to trust. The Second Naiveté is not the restoration of what you had before. It is something harder and more durable — the restoration of perceptual capacity itself, after the Desert has done its necessary work. Faith that has survived contact with the evidence and found that the evidence does not destroy Christ. It clarifies him. The instruments in this book are built for people in the Desert.

Discovery 07

Aleister Crowley as Theological Counterpoint

In 1904, Crowley published "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law." He was not proposing libertinism. He was proposing a competing theology of the will — the self as ultimate orienting center rather than the Divine. Jesus said "Thy will be done" in Gethsemane: the deliberate, costly act of aligning the human will with the source of all knowledge. Doctrine and Covenants 93:39 describes the consequence of the inversion with physical precision: light already present in the system is lost. Two men. Two orientations. Everything downstream follows by the same law.

Discovery 08

Resurrection as Total System Restore

Alma 40:23 is not poetry: "every limb and joint shall be restored to its body; yea, even a hair of the head shall not be lost; but all things shall be restored to their proper and perfect frame." That is a specification. Total system restoration. Not approximate. Not partial. Every node. Every data point. Nothing lost in the recovery. Paul closes it in Greek: "Death is swallowed up in victory." The Second Law doesn't fade at the resurrection. It is consumed by a force more fundamental than itself.

05

05 · Architecture

14 chapters. 5 phases. One capstone.

The project publishes on Substack first — chapter by chapter, as a series — then compiles into a book. The Substack is the pressure test. Readers are beta testers. Confusion means refactor. Resonance means core feature.

I

Phase 1

The Physics of the Soul

Foundations. God operates by law, not whim. Sin is structural decay. Covenants are specific preservatives.

II

Phase 2

The Engineering of Holiness

Application. How the physics operates in a human life. The broken heart as superconductor. Ordinances as system maintenance. Priesthood as organizational capacity, not status.

III

Phase 3

The Open Source Kingdom

Consecration. Scaling from individual to community. The Law of Consecration as merging your local branch into the main branch. Zion as the system where righteousness is the path of least resistance.

IV

Phase 4

The Red Team Audit

Opposition and stress testing. The devil as a QA tester. The doctrinal audit — primary sources as the standard, Brigham's architecture as the deviation. The institutional delta, documented without apology.

V

Phase 5

The Ministry of Christ

Jesus as the proof of concept. The framework incarnate. The Nazareth Protocol. The Temple audit. Babylon as a high-entropy state.

Capstone

Closing chapter

The Babel Fork

The Tower of Babel as catastrophic hard fork of the human codebase. Every thread from every chapter resolved simultaneously into a single coherent field. Zion is not a place of perfect people. It is the ultimate merge resolution — integrating the disparate branches of the human family back into the main. Not deleting other people's code. Reading it. Understanding what it was trying to accomplish. Building something that runs because it finally includes everyone.

ArchitectureCapstone · Visual Aid 01

The Babel Fork

A signal diagram of the world's theologies — one trunk, many fragments, one return.
Origin  left
Babel  center
Merge  right

The Babel Fork Traditions Checklist

  • Zoroastrian: Historical lines of cosmic dualism, light versus darkness.
  • Hermetic: Mystical traditions of correspondence, "as above, so below."
  • Greek: Rationalist philosophical traditions, Logos as organizing logic.
  • Eastern: Non-dualist traditions of harmony, Tao, and consciousness.
  • Merge: The unifying restoration timeline drawing all fragments back to the original source.
Node
06

06 · Execution

The solution ships first. The diagnosis follows.

Right now

Chapter 2 — The Salt Principle — is the launch commit.

It establishes the tone immediately: we are treating theology like physics.

Substack model

Free establishes the diagnostic. Paid carries the case.

Free tier carries the framework posts and observational essays — proof the diagnostic tool is alive and applicable to anything happening in the world right now. Paid tier carries the book itself, chapter by chapter.

Research infrastructure

CleanOCR · The Succession Archives · EBSCO

A custom Python OCR application for 19th-century periodicals — 384 images batch-processed, generating the first modern transcripts of Sidney Rigdon's Messenger & Advocate (January 2026). Primary sources only. The record is there. We can read it now.

Three-pass structure

Ship. Capstone. Retrofit.

Pass 1 ships the chapter commits. Pass 2 writes the capstone. Pass 3 retrofits the introduction and builds transitions so the whole reads as a single escalating argument.

Companion project

Brigham Young's Flying Monkeys — co-authored with Ryan David Dwyer.

Applies Sam Vaknin's malignant narcissism framework forensically to Brigham Young's leadership. The UFT is the solution. Flying Monkeys is the full diagnosis. The solution ships first.

06 · Execution
Three-Pass Build Pipeline
Pass 1
Chapter
Commits
Pass 2
Capstone
Capstone · The Babel Fork
Pending Pass 1 completion Pending
Pass 3
Arc &
Transitions
Introduction + Transitions · The Full Arc
Pending Pass 2 completion Pending
Committed
Pushed to Substack
Pending
1 / 14 committed · 0 pushed
Pass 2 and Pass 3 unlock sequentially

08 · Subscribe

Receive the chapters as they ship.

You grew up believing it completely. The theology, the community, the framework for every hard thing that happened to you. Then the history arrived. Or the culture. Or both.

You’ve done the research. Enough to know something is structurally wrong with the institution. Not enough to hand over the Christ you found in Gethsemane.

Paul Ricoeur called the place you’re standing the Desert of Criticism. The other side has a name too. He called it the Second Naiveté. This book is the path through.

Five repeatable frameworks applied to the primary sources Joseph Smith actually left. The entropy argument ships first.

Free · No algorithm · No schedule

You’ve read the critics. You’ve read the apologists. Neither spoke to you.

Substack opened Complete your subscription in the new tab. Chapter 2 ships when it’s ready.

Delivered via Substack

08 · Closing
Capstone · 2026
Diego Lucero
Be a source Entropy reversed
Awaiting
The world has enough open drains.
Be a source.