In Latter-day Saint discourse, few phrases are as familiar—or as potent—as Joseph Smith’s declaration that the Book of Mormon is “the most correct of any book on earth” and “the keystone of our religion.” Unfortunately, this declaration is so familiar to us that it risks becoming invisible. We quote it. We teach it. We nod along. And yet, like many phrases that slip easily from the tongue, we may not have fully reckoned with what it actually commits us to.
A keystone, as President Ezra Taft Benson reminded the Church, is not decorative. It is structural. Remove it, and the arch collapses. Keep it, and the whole structure holds—quietly, invisibly, doing its work precisely because everything else depends upon it. Though the keystone metaphor is an architectural one, its implications are existential.
Most Latter-day Saints readily affirm that the Book of Mormon is the keystone of our religion. Clearly, the Book of Mormon anchors testimony, clarifies doctrine, and centers the life and mission of Jesus Christ. But what if its role extends further? What if the keystone is not only spiritual, but intellectual? What if the Book of Mormon does not merely sustain religious life but also challenges, reorients, and even overturns many of the assumptions we take for granted in our daily lives?
As a psychology professor (Edwin) who has been laboring in the field for the better part of forty years, I frequently find myself confronting these sorts of questions, both on a personal and a professional level. Seldom does a day go by that I don’t find myself considering the very real possibility that the Book of Mormon might also be a keystone for our thinking—for how we understand the human person, suffering, responsibility, healing, and the meaning of moral life. Further, I find myself wondering what it means to participate in an academic discipline that is constructed atop assumptions that the Book of Mormon quietly, persistently, and fundamentally contradicts.
Turning Things Upside Down
The Restoration has always carried with it a disruptive claim: revelation does not merely supplement human knowledge but can challenge and reorder it. The Book of Mormon itself describes a “turning of things upside down,” a phrase that captures the unsettling possibility that what we think we know may, in fact, be fundamentally mistaken.
In modern psychology, certain assumptions have become so pervasive that they are rarely questioned. They form the background against which theories are built and practices justified. Among these, three stand out: naturalism, determinism, and moral relativism. Though seldom explicitly discussed in the mainstream literature of the discipline, each of these ideas has profoundly shaped how psychologists tend to understand human behavior, suffering, and healing. However, when viewed through the lens of the Book of Mormon, each becomes deeply contestable.
To take the Book of Mormon seriously as a keystone for our thinking, then, is not merely to add a religious gloss to existing scholarly or professional frameworks and theories. It is to ask whether the foundations of such things themselves are even sound.
The Quiet Reign of Naturalism
At the heart of modern psychology lies a commitment—often implicit—to naturalism. Simply put, naturalism holds that all events, including human thoughts and behaviors, can be explained in terms of natural processes governed by natural laws. Applied to scientific methods, it does not necessarily deny God’s existence; it simply brackets God out of the conversation. Scientific explanations proceed “as if” divine action is irrelevant.
This posture is often presented as value neutral. By avoiding theological commitments, many psychologists believe they are able to remain objective, reliant only on empirical and universally accessible data. This stance is often defended under the banner of what is known as methodological naturalism. Many believe this approach to science allows them to “set God aside” by suspending the question of His existence and involvement in the world to maintain neutrality in their research.
At the heart of modern psychology lies a commitment—often implicit—to naturalism.
Ironically, modern psychology’s attempt to explain human behavior and experience without reference to God actually embodies a theological claim—not explicitly, but functionally. It suggests that divine action, if it even exists, is not necessary for adequately understanding the world. God becomes, at best, a distant architect or a symbolic comfort. At worst, He becomes irrelevant.
The Book of Mormon’s Disruptive God
The Book of Mormon, by contrast, knows nothing of a passive deity.
In fact, it offers a radically different vision. God is not shown to be absent but active, not distant but intimately involved. He speaks, directs, intervenes, and sustains. He is not merely the origin of the world but the One who sustains, enlightens, and sanctifies its ongoing life. As Alma teaches, “all things denote that there is a God,” and not a passive one. Creation itself is a continuous expression of divine will.
This difference is not trivial. It reshapes the entire framework within which human behavior is understood. If God is actively involved in the world—and in the lives of individuals—then any account of human experience that excludes Him is, at best, incomplete, at worst, life-alteringly misunderstood.
More importantly, the Book of Mormon presents a God who does not merely observe but who actively participates. In Christ, He descends into the human condition, experiencing pain, temptation, and sorrow so that He may “succor his people according to their infirmities.” This is not a God who can be relegated to the margins of our lives and identities. This is a God whose involvement is central to understanding suffering and healing.
The God we meet in the Book of Mormon is not a background assumption or an optional metaphysical add-on. He is the active source of life, light, order, and meaning. He commands the earth to move—and it moves. He enters history. He speaks. He judges. He redeems. He suffers.
This vision of God does not sit comfortably alongside a psychology that treats divine action as, at best, irrelevant. If God is as the Book of Mormon describes Him, then any account of human life that systematically excludes Him is not neutral—it is false.
Determinism and the Vanishing Human
Psychology, patterned after the natural sciences, has adopted a conceptual framework in which to be “scientific” is to assume that human behavior, like planetary motion or chemical reactions, is governed by universal laws that we can discover, understand, and study. To appeal to divine action, moral agency, or spiritual causation is not merely unfashionable—it is intellectually disqualifying.
Naturalism’s most consequential psychological offspring is determinism: the belief that human behavior is the necessary result of prior causes. Choice becomes an illusion. Freedom becomes a feeling. Moral responsibility becomes a social convention.
Psychologists routinely insist that without determinism, scientific explanation (and, thus, real understanding) collapses. After all, if we can’t explain why people are depressed, anxious, self-destructive, or obsessive, how can we ‘fix’ them? Indeed, looking at human behavior through a lens of determinism and causal forces provides a degree of safety and certainty for altering or controlling human behavior. If people are free, on the other hand, as psychologist Gary W. Heiman asserts, then “behavior truly would be chaotic, because the only explanation for every behavior would be ‘because he or she wanted to’.” Thus, he continues, “we reject the idea that free will plays a role” of any sort in human actions.
Looking at human behavior through a lens of determinism and causal forces provides a degree of safety and certainty for altering or controlling human behavior.
The fear here seems to be that a psychology not wedded to determinism cannot be scientific because it would have no way of explaining human behavior. In the absence of determinism, it is argued, all human actions are ultimately just random, unpredictable events arising out of nothing but the arbitrary exercise of will. Indeed, as psychologist John Baer has written, determinism is what “makes psychology possible. If psychological events were not determined—caused—by antecedent events, psychology could make no sense.”
But this framing presents a false dilemma. Either human action is mechanically determined or it is irrational noise. Either we are puppets or we are accidents. What disappears in this binary is the possibility that human beings are agents—persons who act meaningfully within contexts without being reducible to them.
The Book of Mormon refuses this reduction at every turn.
Lehi’s famous distinction between “things to act” and “things to be acted upon” is not poetic flourish. It is philosophical anthropology. To be human is not merely to respond to forces, but to initiate action—to choose between genuine alternatives with real moral weight.
This is not randomness. It is responsibility.
Agency, in the Book of Mormon, is not a marginal feature of personhood. It is the hinge upon which salvation, sin, repentance, and redemption all turn. Without agency, moral language collapses, covenant becomes incoherent, and judgment becomes unjust.
A psychology that cannot account for agency cannot account for the human being the Book of Mormon describes.
Meaning, Nihilism, and Moral Evasion
Unfortunately, once determinism takes hold, meaning soon follows it out the door. If every thought, feeling, and action is the inevitable outcome of forces beyond one’s control, then nothing we do could truly have any meaning. For our actions to have meaning, in the strictest sense of the word, it must be genuinely possible for them to be otherwise than they are. If nothing we do could possibly have been otherwise, then does anything we do really matter? Only because we can forgive another does holding a grudge against them become a sin rather than simply a reflexive response.
Likewise, God’s engagement with His people truly matters because He does have the option to do otherwise but continues to be involved intimately in the lives of His children. The possibilities available to us in life are what offer us real meaning. Indeed, God’s gift of agency is what gives man the opportunity to have meaningful lives.
But, when we implicitly–or explicitly–subscribe to tenets of determinism, meaningful options become unavailable to us. Events simply happen. Moral distinctions dissolve into descriptions. Praise and blame become sentimental relics of a more primitive belief system.
This is why determinism so often travels with moral relativism. If behavior is produced rather than chosen, then moral evaluation becomes either unfair or incoherent. At best, morality becomes a useful fiction—an evolutionary adaptation or social convenience. At worst, it becomes a tool of power.
Psychology, in this form, does not merely explain behavior. It quietly absolves it of all moral content, purpose, and worth. Moral language is replaced with therapeutic language. Problems are framed in terms of dysfunction rather than wrongdoing, adjustment rather than repentance. Under the umbrella of determinism, we would be punishing people and criminalizing behaviors over which they do not actually have control and do not actually play any real participatory role. To make a moral judgment of a person’s behavior when they have no control over that behavior would be akin to mistreating someone based only on the color of their skin, something which is also outside of personal control. The goal of much morally relativized psychotherapy, then, is to alleviate individual distress by the most efficient means available, rather than help patients discern and orient themselves toward that which is true, worthy of moral praise, and spiritually fulfilling.
The Book of Mormon, again, stands for judgment.
Its pages are saturated with moral claims—warnings, invitations, rebukes, and promises. Sin is not redefined as maladaptive coping. Repentance is not reframed as cognitive restructuring. Good and evil are not negotiated away as cultural constructs. In fact, they are real, binding, and consequential. However, the Book of Mormon does recognize complexity, context, and suffering in its exploration of all aspects of distress, not only the kind that can be wrought by sin. Even within those contexts, though, it does insist that moral agency is real and that moral distinctions matter. Indeed, moral reality and moral expectation don’t disappear simply because life is unfair. One could even say that they matter more in such a reality.
Further, Lehi teaches that humans are “enticed by the one or the other,” suggesting a world in which good and evil are not arbitrary but real alternatives. Moroni adds that “the Spirit of Christ is given to every man, that he may know good from evil.” Conscience is not merely a social product; it is a divine endowment.
Therapy, Suffering, and the Missing Christ
These teachings have profound implications for psychology and psychotherapy. If moral knowledge is, at least in part, divinely given, then purely naturalistic accounts of morality are not only insufficient, they are woefully misleading. If choices have real consequences—both temporal and eternal—then therapeutic approaches that ignore moral dimensions miss something essential.
Modern therapeutic culture often treats moral language as dangerous—judgmental, oppressive, unscientific. Healing is pursued through adjustment because suffering is merely a technical problem, and therapists become the scientific experts uniquely situated to objectively manage human problems. Simply identify the variables producing particular forms of distress and then modify them to produce more pleasant outcomes.
The Book of Mormon, in contrast, offers a different grammar of healing.
It does not deny the reality of pain, trauma, or affliction. It does not claim that all suffering is the direct result of sin. But it insists—unapologetically—that Christ’s atoning life, death, and resurrection are relevant to all forms of human suffering. This is not to suggest that God’s involvement in human affairs is the only matter that matters. Rather, it is only to say that our understanding of what does matter will be hopelessly incomplete if God’s participation and involvement in our lives is minimized, ignored, or dismissed.
Modern therapeutic culture often treats moral language as dangerous.
Again, this does not mean that therapy can only be helpful if we explicitly explore Christ and His gospel teachings with our patients. There are, after all, many who seek therapeutic services who do not believe in Christ and may well not be receptive to such conversations. Instead, what we are suggesting here is that we should never reduce fundamental truths and, by extension, moral reality, to independent, relative, or self-determined values. By bringing the question of truth and moral reality into therapy as orienting concerns, we bring Christ into the consulting room, even if we may not be talking about Him specifically.
Rethinking the “Natural Man”
Some Latter-day Saints attempt a compromise. They suggest that secular psychology studies the “natural man” (Mosiah 3:19)—the fallen, unredeemed aspect of human nature, while the gospel addresses matters of personal faith and spiritual belief. Each has its independent domain. On this view, psychological theories are not wrong, just incomplete. They capture part of the picture but miss the transformative potential of grace.
Unfortunately, this move misreads King Benjamin.
The “natural man” spoken of in Mosiah 3 is not a biologically determined creature reacting helplessly to environmental stimuli, an organism constantly and unavoidably seeking after its own pleasure. Rather, as King Benjamin teaches, the “natural man” is an “enemy to God” not because he is selfish and sinful by nature, but because of the moral choices he makes—because he yields not to the Spirit and does not put off sinful desires, because he chooses not to become a “saint.” These are verbs of agency, not inevitability.
Thus, insofar as it denies moral agency as fundamental to human nature, secular psychology does not even get the “natural man” right. By mischaracterizing human nature, secular psychology is espousing the self-justifying perspective of the “natural man”—one that reduces human beings to objects and, thereby, obscures their fundamentally moral, spiritual, and relational nature. In offering such an account of humanity, it provides ammunition to support the very rebellion against God that the Book of Mormon diagnoses: the attempt to escape moral responsibility by denying moral agency, meaning, and purpose.
In the end, it seems that one of the first choices the “natural man” seeks to make is to deny any capacity to make meaningful, moral choices. Once that choice is made, the next step is to establish an entire intellectual enterprise to provide all the research and theories necessary to confirm that denial and justify continued rebellion against God.
Keystone Remembered: Toward a More Faithful Science
What might a psychology informed by the Book of Mormon look like in practice?
First, it would take seriously the reality of divine involvement. Therapy would not be confined to human-to-human interaction but would recognize the possibility of God’s participation in healing. Prayer, revelation, and spiritual practices would not be peripheral but potentially central for those who desire to explore those things explicitly in session. And, for those who do not subscribe to any kind of Christian perspective, any truth brought into session reflects Christ, whether or not we use His name. Truth must be spoken, but it must also be spoken in a language that can be heard and understood.
Secular psychology does not even get the “natural man” right.
Second, it would affirm agency. Clients would not be seen merely as victims of circumstance but as agents capable of meaningful choice—even in difficult conditions. This does not deny the influence of trauma, biology, or environment, but it resists reducing individuals to those influences.
Third, it would reintroduce moral language. Not in a judgmental or simplistic way, but in a way that acknowledges that some forms of suffering are connected to choices—and that healing may involve repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation.
Finally, it would center Christ. The Book of Mormon teaches that Christ’s Atonement is relevant to all forms of suffering. He not only redeems from sin but succors in pain. A therapist who takes this seriously would not sideline Christ. Rather, in taking the Book of Mormon seriously, the therapist would strive to continually consider how the Savior’s life and sacrifice intersect with the client’s experience and needs, as well as how best to minister to the client in a language and manner the client can understand and accept.
None of this, however, requires rejecting psychology wholesale. The empirical insights, therapeutic techniques, and research findings of modern psychology are valuable. But they must be examined, not assumed. They must be sifted, not simply adopted.
If the Book of Mormon is truly the keystone, then its significance cannot be confined to the chapel. It must extend into the classroom, the clinic, and the research lab. It must shape not only how we worship but how we think. This does not mean that the Book of Mormon replaces all other sources of knowledge. But it does mean that it has something to say—something essential—to every domain concerned with human life.
In the end, the question is not whether the Book of Mormon is relevant to psychology. It is whether we are willing to let it be. To do so is to risk having our assumptions overturned. But it is also to open the possibility of seeing more clearly—of coming nearer not only to God, as Joseph Smith promised, but also to ourselves.
