When the Church of Jesus Christ was restored to the earth, its young prophet Joseph Smith was told by an angel that in the future, his name “should be both good and evil spoken of among all people” (JSH 1:33).
Book-length fulfillment of this prophecy began a decade later as Eber D. Howe published Mormonism Unveiled (1), followed by hundreds of antagonistic broadsides, pamphlets, and publications by others containing basically similar messages—across 190-plus years.
Among all these Church-hostile publications, it appears that none experienced a more rapid or broader public distribution and impact than what is now known as The CES Letter, authored by Jeremy Runnells—which soared across the Internet in 2013. Scholars familiar with its content, however, immediately recognized that few, if any, of its accusations were new, and most had already been repeatedly refuted. In fact, a large part of the essay, further analysis confirms, reflects a condensed version of writings and concepts that the author borrowed or rephrased from other long-time, prominent anti-Latter-day Saint writers. Few, if any, of its accusations were new, and most had already been repeatedly refuted.
We observe at least four forces that converged in 2013 to create an ideal atmosphere and opportunity for such an antagonistic 75-page publication to easily fill cyberspace with its anti-Christ, anti-Restoration allegations. This perfect storm resulted from:
1. The expanding popularity of the Internet and the establishment of PDF as a document standard—within a society still naive to its full implications.
2. The disbanding at Brigham Young University (BYU) of the Foundation of Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS) in 2010 and the Neal A. Maxwell Institute’s subsequent pivot away from the day-to-day defense of the Church.
3. The lack of easily accessible and comprehensive discussions of subjects like those raised in The CES Letter, now available in the Gospel Topic Essays, that thoughtfully explain many complicated and sometimes controversial issues.
4. The CES Letter’s clever wrapping of a set of concise arguments against the faith in a personal story—that being a supposed search for truth and subsequent betrayal by the Church—all contained within a compact, easy-to-distribute PDF document. (This fourth dynamic was discovered to be false and documented at length in Michael Peterson and Jacob Hess’s Were These Ever the Sincere Questions of an Earnest Truth Seeker?)
1. The Expanding Popularity of the Internet and the Establishment of PDF as a Document Standard.
The World Wide Web rapidly expanded in popularity and accessibility during the 2000s. By 2013, nearly three-fourths of the inhabitants in developed countries had access.
During this same period, electronic publishing technology also expanded, thus allowing for the rapid distribution of electronic books and articles in ways previously unimaginable. Critical to this development was a computer program that produced a fixed-page-layout file format that could be opened in a variety of computer operating systems without losing its book-like qualities—including pagination.
In 1993, Adobe Systems led the programming competition with its Portable Document Format (PDF). After guarding it as intellectual property for fifteen years, Adobe displayed shrewd business logic in 2008 by offering the PDF as an open format (PDF 1.7)—allowing software developers worldwide to develop and provide tools for the creation, modification, viewing, and printing of PDF files if they adhered to Adobe’s original PDF specifications.
Also, in 2008, Adobe offered its Reader 2.0 as a free download. This enabled web designers and authors to offer their publications as PDF downloads with an accompanying link to the free PDF viewer. Readers could easily download both the app and the book or article and view the original text as it was designed to be read.
Advanced distribution capability. Soon other free PDF viewers became available, and popular Internet search engines incorporated them into their browsers (2).
A new world began to emerge, empowering individual authors and content creators to distribute their views instantly, in increasingly persuasive ways, across a mammoth distribution channel: the World Wide Web.
The reality is that before the early 2010s, it would have been difficult to widely distribute any computerized books or extensive articles such as The CES Letter. Documents circulated as Microsoft Word or WordPerfect files would have been susceptible to formatting changes when the files were opened, as well as alteration from other readers.
Facebook and Reddit as catalysts. Another online dynamic occurred simultaneously with the PDF expansion: the increasing popularity of Facebook. The year he introduced his CES Letter, Jeremy Runnells expanded his online footprint by creating a “CESLetter” Facebook page. Begun in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook social networking service had over 1.3 billion users by 2014. It was a natural fit for Runnells since people familiar with Facebook would likely understand how to download a PDF file and viewer. So, he advertised his essay on the platform, with a link to a separate location where a PDF version of the document could be downloaded. He also used Reddit, another forum social network, to provide updates regarding his personal saga with the Church.
The rapid growth of Reddit contributed to the spread of Runnells’ letter. By the 2010s, Reddit was expanding its footprint on the internet—with 46 million users by 2012 and 90 million by 2013—exceeding 174 million users in 2014. Through a Church-hostile Reddit pseudonym —Kolobot—the author attached drafts of his essay, promoted it, attacked critics, crowdsourced material for responses to rebuttals of his essay, and advertised his website. A factor catalyzing this perfect storm involved the dissolution of FARMS.
2. The disbanding at Brigham Young University of The Foundation of Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS) in 2010 and the Neal A. Maxwell Institute’s subsequent pivot away from the day-to-day defense of the Church.
The second factor catalyzing this perfect storm involved the dissolution of the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS) at BYU. Organized by Dr. John W. Welch in 1979, FARMS consisted of an informal collaboration of academics devoted to Latter-day Saint historical scholarship.
But this foundation later became more institutional. In 1998, President Gordon B. Hinckley of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints formally invited FARMS to join Brigham Young University—stating: “FARMS represents the efforts of sincere and dedicated scholars. It has grown to provide strong support and defense of the Church on a professional basis.”(3) Yet less than a decade afterward, there was a significant change, as the entity was subsumed by the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship (NAMI) and effectively disbanded.
“Those guys were warriors.” Prior to this, FARMS’ association with BYU (sponsored and funded by the Church, during the 2000s) gave these advocates of the faith much-needed backing and resources that contributed to an ever more effective defense of the gospel of Jesus Christ. “Those guys were warriors,” remarked one prominent Church defender—a common sentiment. It seemed that whenever any new book or conspicuous article appeared on the scene attacking the Church, FARMS was there, with effective and credible scholarship, sourcing, and writings to document and defend the truth.
The effectiveness of this concentrated defense of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from a strong professional, academic, and faith foundation was powerfully illustrated in the aftermath of Grant Palmer’s 2003 anti-Latter-day Saint book: An Insiders View of Mormon Origins. This volume was released on the market with great fanfare by Signature Books (known for its longtime publication of works that criticize the core doctrines and principles of the Church, the policies revealed through modern prophets, and the history of the restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ).
The FARMS Review—a twice-yearly journal comprised of peer-reviewed articles from many faithful scholars defending the Church—took notice.
On June 1, 2004, four separate reviews of Mr. Palmer’s book were simultaneously published in the journal’s “Review of Books.” All of these “heavy hitter” reviewers possessed PhDs, several of them in history. All had significant academic experience and fluency with the subject material and the specific areas of attack Palmer made upon the Church of Jesus Christ—demonstrated by the strength of their reviews:
- Dr. Stephen C. Harper’s Trustworthy History? incisively demonstrated the manipulation of data and evidence Mr. Palmer engaged in to support his Church-hostile thesis while highlighting significant scholars, topics, and sources the critic had selectively ignored. In his well-referenced critique, this historian summarized Palmer’s book as “a pitiful failure to write credible history” through a failure to “obey rules of historical methodology,” concluding that the work was “not trustworthy history.”
- Dr. Davis Bitton’s The Charge of a Man with a Broken Lance (But Look What He Doesn’t Tell Us) remarked on Palmer’s claim to be an “insider” in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. While “wearing the toga of a retired institute director” Palmer had “lived a life of deceit for many years” by remaining affiliated with the Church’s education system while he was a closet doubter. Bitton also revealed that Palmer “presents information as his own that is straight out of previous anti-[Latter-day Saint] works” (including Jerald and Sandra Tanner), “publish[es] them within the covers of a newly minted book,” and thereby “tries to shock the reader”—while ignoring incredible amounts of scholarly work disproving his claims.
- Prying into Palmer by Dr. Louis C. Midgley focused on evidence that “Insider’s Guide” is actually based on a previous work from Palmer written over a decade earlier under the pseudonym “Paul Pry Jr” and titled New York Mormonism—a work that was not “the product of original research, but instead, a compendium of anti-[Latter-day Saint] arguments … infatuated with … many of the affidavits in E.D. Howe’s notorious Mormonism Unveiled (1834), all of which [Palmer] wove together with opinions drawn from some marginal contemporary critics of the faith.” Midgley’s review then laid waste Palmer’s bizarre theories about the origin of the Book of Mormon.
- A One-sided View of Mormon Origins by Dr. Mark Ashurst-McGee effectively refutes every major section of Palmer’s book and summarizes it as “a piece of disingenuous advertising.” The book, he argues, “intends to present Palmer as a seasoned gospel teacher who will shepherd those who wish to learn more about the origins of their faith” but then seeks to “discredit the integrity of the foundational claims upon which the faith of the Saints rests.” McGee again reveals that the book “fails to follow the basic standards for historical methodology.”
Six months later, on January 1, 2005, the FARMS Review released a fifth review of Palmer’s book: Asked and Answered: A Response to Grant H. Palmer, by Dr. James B. Allen—focusing on Palmer’s individual criticisms of the Book of Mormon. Allen references several scholarly studies that counter much of the author’s attack while demonstrating the ancient text’s truthfulness. He also effectively takes apart the author’s odd theories surrounding the coming forth of the Book of Mormon.
This barrage of academic artillery in five separate academic reviews effectively illustrated the shallowness of one anti-Latter-day Saint book—leaving it essentially impotent. Over subsequent years, Grant Palmer’s book was generally ineffective in persuading others to leave the faith or remain away from it—except among some of the more uninformed or already hardened detractors of the Church. Its faith-draining influence, over time, became a blip.
What if FARMS had been around when The CES Letter was written? Imagine what likely would have happened with the 75-page CES Letter had the same FARMS weaponry still been in place in the spring of 2013. We can easily see each of the essay’s seven or eight areas of attack upon the faith answered by a separate academic scholar—all released simultaneously. Then each of these potential refutations would likely be followed by its author’s comments or interviews, online discussions, and further dissemination.
The impact of such FARMS activity might have been substantial in reducing the widespread and corrosive effects of Jeremy Runnells’ writings.
In the years following the release of Runnells’ letter, it’s true that several major refutations were eventually published, including FAIR’s initial online response in 2013, (4) Bamboozled by the CES Letter by Michael R. Ash (2015), A Faithful Reply to the CES Letter by Jim Bennet (2018), and Sarah Allen’s The CES Letter Rebuttal (2021-2022). Allen’s voluminous work not only painstakingly refuted the entire contents of Runnells’ writings but also exposed the manipulation techniques and background deception of the essay. Yet this series of responses was sporadic and irregular—lacking the concentrated efficiency and cohesion for which FARMS was known.
Different emphasis from scholars. Clearly, not every Latter-day Saint scholar has an appetite for raising their voice in a defensive posture concerning the faith—with some scholars feeling little interest in defending the Church generally or at all. Among those who do show such a willingness, there are varying levels of engagement—ranging from those who write things about the faith while mainly leaving it to others to repackage them to be of use to everyday members, to those scholars who identify current, specific claims against the Church from specific authors and refute those particular claims on a day-to-day or real-time basis.
Never shying away from controversial subjects or defending the Church’s official and unofficial positions, scholars at FARMS were consistently among the most actively engaged in the most relevant issues and conflicts.
A vacuum begins. Nevertheless, in the years after disbanding FARMS in 2010, BYU’s Neal A. Maxwell Institute (NAMI) unfortunately also chose to discontinue this level of day-to-day Church defense—even taking the step of removing archived FARMS articles from its website. Scholars at FARMS were consistently among the most actively engaged.
Yet among all the podcast notes, titles, and publications of the Maxwell Institute available between 2013 and 2015—right when the popularity of The CES Letter ballooned—we could not identify any addressing the specific issues raised in Runnells’ essay.
Hesitation among some believing academics. The reluctance of any believing scholar to actively defend the Church is perhaps understandable. Religious authors who write for a religious audience can explore ideas in the relative comfort of a mutually accepted paradigm regarding the supernatural. But when religious authors advance narratives that defend the reality of the supernatural before a more pluralistic audience, they risk professional disrespect, ad hominem attacks from activist naturalists, and public notoriety (positive from believers and negative from secularists).
In short, defending the Church’s truth claims positions the scholarly defender against critical voices who, for the most part, have received broad popularity and society-wide endorsement. Even at Church-owned universities, performing extensive apologetic work may be less advantageous to tenure advancement than publishing articles in respected secular peer-review journals or authoring books printed by prestigious university presses.
More recently, scholars at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute have expanded the definition of “apologetics” to include scholarship that anticipates believers’ questions and responds accordingly. “Good traditional apologetics,” according to this expanded definition, “leaves neither the Book of Mormon nor ancient history in the state it found them. It transforms both in the name of faith, seeking insight and understanding.”
While good things are afoot at Maxwell and other faith defense organizations like Scripture Central, and FAIR, this relative vacuum during the early 2010’s may have contributed to some unfortunate effects.
Over subsequent years, youth and young adults oftentimes starkly confronted the claims of The CES Letter, along with other online church attacks contained in the writings and podcasts of other prominent church critics—absent the scholarly strength FARMS could have provided. Soon after FARMS was dissolved, the Church of Jesus Christ essentially lost its primary institutionally-supported defense organization—leaving FAIR and other good organizations, such as The Interpreter Foundation (begun in 2012), to soldier on to try to make up the difference.
3. The lack of easily accessible and comprehensive discussions of subjects like those raised in The CES Letter, now available in the Gospel Topic Essays, that thoughtfully explain many complicated and sometimes controversial issues.
During the first 170 years of the existence of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, leaders largely led the Church’s narrative. When most members learned religious teachings and doctrines from official sources like the scriptures, manuals, and books written by believers, critics often struggled to obtain an audience among the Latter-day Saints using the media of the times.
By the 2000s, the rise of the Internet impacted the Church’s communications with its members and conveyance of its message—with critics’ vigorous criticisms and negative evaluations over the web impacting the faith and necessitating an adjustment in educational efforts. The rise of the Internet impacted the Church’s communications with its members.
General caution and care. There are at least two good reasons for care and caution in how Church history is shared:
- Milk before meat. Even before the Church was organized, the Lord Jesus Christ warned Joseph Smith not to give “meaty” doctrines to those who could only tolerate milk, “lest they perish” (D&C 19:22; see also 1 Cor. 3:2). Due to the fledgling faith of some learners, the revelation emphasized that certain more complicated principles and practices should only be taught under the right conditions. Members’ natural hesitancy on complex and controversial matters was exploited by some online, who accused the faith of a lack of transparency.
- Limited teaching time. A second factor is the limited amount of time and opportunities the Church has to teach the membership the core gospel of Jesus Christ. Within relatively short Sunday meetings, there is an understandable prioritizing of core doctrine that results in a curriculum of scripture, doctrine, and history that builds faith yet naturally makes the controversies and other complex subjects secondary.
Gradual release of additional resources. During this rise of critical voices on the Internet, many documents in the Church’s vast archives had yet to be cataloged, analyzed, and used to clarify various aspects of Church history.
The Joseph Smith Papers project (formalized in 2008 and completed in 2023) provided additional human resources to inventory pertinent archival data, and voluminous numbers of new documents were added to the official catalog. However, for some time, such content remained largely unknown to researchers, church leaders, and members. For example, as independent scholar Don Bradley researched the subject of plural marriage in 2009, Church historians occasionally directed him to recently cataloged manuscripts dealing with that sensitive subject. In several cases, Bradley appeared to be the first external researcher to evaluate their contents. Today the Church’s documentary holdings are freely offered to the public and often as digital downloads. Josephsmithpapers.org is a treasure trove of easily accessible historical information.
Years before The CES Letter was released, leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints recognized the need to expand the Church’s resources to members, specifically to produce “straightforward, in-depth essays” on a number of more complicated topics. So the Church commissioned historians and other scholars to gather accurate information from many different sources and publications and place it in the Gospel Topics section of ChurchofJesusChrist.org. The first of these essays was released in the fall of 2013, just six months after Runnells’ letter was made public. Between 2013 and 2015, thirteen Gospel Topic Essays were added to the Church’s official website. Surely this was an inspired development, coinciding with Runnells’ aggressive marketing of his writings during those same years. Between 2013 and 2015, thirteen Gospel Topic Essays were added.
Certainly, an earlier introduction to the Church’s essays may have inoculated members of the Church from the antagonistic “CES Letter”—with adequate time to absorb their contents well before Runnells’ essay’ first became public. Lacking such prior understanding, it’s easier for a believer to be unsettled by an antagonist’s ‘gotcha’ question—“Did you know X…” “Why do you think Y happened?”—in a way that leads to doubt.
4. The CES Letter’s clever wrapping of a set of concise arguments against the faith in a personal story—a supposed search for truth and subsequent Church betrayal—all contained within a compact, easy-to-distribute PDF document.
As already noted, this fourth dynamic that contributed to the wide dissemination of Runnells’ essay—the false nature of the origin and purpose of his letter—was outlined in detail in Michael Peterson’s analysis with Jacob Hess, “Were These Ever the Sincere Questions of an Earnest Truth Seeker?”
After reviewing the overwhelming evidence documented there, they concluded:
“Unmistakably, across thousands of affected readers, it was this shiny wrapper of an “earnest questioner” that gave the so-called letter its broadcastable power, functioning as a compelling personal and online brand. For many, it was simply too hard to resist the allure of Runnells’ professed need to get “faith crisis” questions answered by the Church, followed by the presumed heartbreak of official Church silence in response.
From the scope of the actual online record, it is patently obvious that Jeremy Runnells constructed his so-called “CES Letter” not to get personal “questions” and “concerns” answered—his pretense—but as a device to rocket ship his carefully planned, full-throated public attack upon the faith of those who believe in Jesus Christ and His restored Church.
While intentionally preparing his faith-attacking essay to be disseminated over the web and through email (from its beginning), he was long past any sincere inquiry stage of religious doubt.”
The Improbability of Another Perfect Storm
In the years following the release of The CES Letter, additional copycat letters followed and became available online. These authors may have expected their refined antagonistic offerings to supplant, or at least replicate, The CES Letter’s reach. Yet additional technology shifts and more easily available faithful resources caused the perfect storm to lift—The CES Letter’s homemade rocket launch to stratospheric levels, its dominance and widespread notoriety not only faded but now increasingly looks unlikely to recur.
Moreover, the information technologies employed to defend the Church’s truth claims have dramatically diversified and expanded. For example, the Church’s history is open to anyone to research using literally tens of thousands of pages of full-text primary sources available at the Church History Library and Joseph Smith Papers Project websites. How’s that for transparency? There is still more positive change in the air.
Independent Defenders
There is still more positive change in the air. Although no institutionally sponsored organization has adopted FARMS’s comprehensive everyday efforts to defend the Church regarding specific accusations, several independent 501(c)(3) corporations have appeared or expanded their efforts to fill the gap. Their work not only defends the faith but tends to be devotional and inoculative.
Specifically, at least five organizations have demonstrated a willingness to actively defend the Church’s teachings and doctrines: FAIR, the Interpreter Foundation, the More Good Foundation (including Saints Unscripted and Public Square Magazine), Scripture Central (including Book of Mormon Central and Pearl of Great Price Central), and the B. H. Roberts Foundation (Mormonr). In particular, Saints Unscripted and B. H. Roberts Foundation give youth and young adults interesting and concise material and persuasive advocacy in defense of the Church.
Besides these organizations, increasing numbers of other websites, podcasts, and YouTube channels provide useful dialogue and insights for those encountering The CES Letter and other anti-Latter-day Saint claims, including The Stick of Joseph, Thoughtful Faith, Ward Radio, and Let’s Get Real with Stephen Jones. Within the Church, hundreds, if not thousands, of believers have taken to heart the instruction, “It becometh every man [and woman] who hath been warned to warn his neighbor” (D&C 88:81). As these members of the Church recognize the deceptions, half-truths, and misrepresentations promoted by critics, they share their own cautions and witness of Jesus Christ with those who will listen.
Other channels and podcasts strengthen faith by profiling inspiring stories of those who have returned to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints after stepping away for a season, such as the Comeback Podcast, Called to Share, and Faith Matters. The Church defense community today is better positioned than ever.
The good news is this: the days are largely over when The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and defenders of the faith need ever be caught again in a reactive state or behind their quick-footed online adversaries. There is far too much current, easy access to voluminous, reliable sources defending the faith of Christ for that to happen.
Though the claims in Runnells’ essay, as noted, have now been exhaustively and directly refuted many times—with content largely echoing accusations that had been repeatedly addressed in the past by Latter-day Saint scholars. Upon its initial release, however, that alluring doubt bomb just happened to be in the right place at the right time, where random but synergistic forces increased its impact far beyond the significance of its message.
The internet “icon” ultimately faded. By rising in popularity so quickly, The CES Letter morphed into the world of antagonistic iconography, becoming, for some detractors a symbol of imagined anti-Latter-day Saint domination. One of the stranger things we witness even today is some who still stubbornly cling to Runnells’ essay and the background storylines behind it, fruitlessly attempting its defense—perhaps partly because upon that shaky foundation, they based or reinforced their decision to step away from the faith.
Our observation, in summary, is that the “perfect storm” dynamics that enabled Runnells’ “CES letter” to go viral have changed fundamentally. The Church defense community today is better positioned than ever to truly fulfill the charge given to us all by President Jeffery R. Holland of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles: “to define, document, and defend the faith.” (7)
Then one day in the future, when the truth of God has indeed “penetrated every continent, visited every clime, swept every country, and sounded in every ear,” the world will know that Joseph Smith spoke the truth when despite the ominous possibilities he foresaw (“persecutions may rage, mobs may combine, armies may assemble, calumny may defame”), he nonetheless testified that “no unhallowed hand can stop the work from progressing” and declared that “the truth of God will go forth boldly, nobly, and independent … till the purposes of God shall be accomplished.”
Resources:
1. The term “Mormonism,” employed by antagonists as a substitute name for the restored Church of Jesus Christ, was “invented in the 1830’s by bitter detractors, as Michael wrote earlier, and “used in the same way the word ‘Nazarenes’ labeled the members of the ancient church of Christ—hurled forth as an epithet, a denigration, a sometime demonization, and consistently employed for the same purposes by their successor critics for over 190 years, even to this day.”
2. For example, the Google Chrome browser added a PDF viewer in late 2010. Microsoft Internet Explorer (final version 11 released in 2013) never included a PDF viewer, but add-on viewers were allowed. Microsoft Edge’s first release in 2015 included its own PDF viewer. Google Chrome version 6.0.472 was released September 2, 2010 (https://google.fandom.com/wiki/Chrome_version_history)—though the PDF reader needed to be manually chosen as the default position or it would not load on startup.
3. See “Farms Joins BYU Community,” Y Magazine, Spring 1998 Issue.
4. FAIR stands for “Faithful Answers, Informed Response, and is a nonprofit organization devoted to sharing the gospel and defending the restored Church of Jesus Christ, through its websites, books, and conferences. FAIR’s writers have accomplished remarkable work, considering they are all volunteers. Most are not academic historians with advanced degrees, but lay writers. These church defenders might be characterized as a modestly funded, scattered collection of researchers who all have day jobs, church callings, and families. They use their precious discretionary hours refuting attacks against both the Church and believers.
5. “Seven Questions for MSR editor Spencer Fluhman,” (March 27, 2013) at https://mi.byu.edu/seven-questions-for-spencer-fluhman/.
6. For instance, they discuss at least three helpful factors in considering the Church’s early practice of plural marriage. First, it has scriptural and biblical roots. Second, it is a spiritual principle. Third, it has been initiated or discontinued at the Lord Jesus Christ’s discretion. When these elements are understood, as well as its true history and practice, along with the family solidarity and other benefits within the early modern Church, then the topic need not be a stumbling block to faith and testimony.
7. The Second Half of the Second Century Address,” BYU, August 23, 2021.
