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David Archuleta’s new book, Devout, begins as a moving and candid account of overcoming family trauma, toxic relationship dynamics, suicidal ideation, and an overbearing father determined to live vicariously through his talented son.

Which is why its ultimate conclusion is so tragic.

Because his understanding of God was that of a bludgeon instead of a balm, David decided that leaving the safety of the restored gospel was the best route for him and could be for others.

There’s no way for any of us to know what choice we would make in his shoes, so this isn’t about judging his heart. Thankfully, that’s God’s job. But it is about making righteous judgments about the morality of his choices and the impact his advocacy will have on others. As Latter-day Saints, how do we currently respond to stories like David’s, and how could we shift that response toward something more theologically sound and compassionate?

Patterns of Responding

There’s a predictable pattern that emerges whenever a prominent Latter-day Saint comes out as gay. This pattern typically plays out on both extremes of the political divide. One side uses the announcement as an excuse to ignore, belittle, or theologically dunk on anyone battling with LGBT+ concerns and questions. While that’s going on, the other side recognizes the individual’s sincere expression of pain and uses it to discourage faith-affirming, truth-filled ministering. 

As a sexual minority myself, I alternate between being engrossed with watching it unfold one day and being completely jaded by the drama the next. While our stories diverge in many ways, I do understand the feeling of watching a Church-wide debate that addresses deeply personal aspects of myself. It can be engaging, but it can also be frustrating. 

Both approaches come with a variety of intentions and goals—both good and bad—but both approaches also get us further from reconciliation, community, and truth. Let’s explore these patterns, examine how they fall short of discipleship, and uncover some possible alternatives.

Pattern 1: Apathy and Dismissal

One pattern of responding comes from a subset of Latter-day Saints who are deeply committed to their faith but struggle to embrace any attempts to address morally complex issues, especially LGBT+ issues. Either they take hard conversations about these topics as an attack on faith that requires an aggressive response, or they worry about saying the wrong thing and do not engage at all.

I have great sympathy for both of these worries. After seeing so many examples of church members using LGBT+ issues as a way to shoehorn progressive politics into the gospel, I find myself starting from a place of skepticism whenever I encounter the topic in a faith context. But seeing so many poor examples of addressing a topic doesn’t automatically justify avoiding the topic altogether.

When we encounter approaches like the one in David’s book, it can sometimes feel easy to justify taking a dismissive approach to his story or the story of others like him. Although David’s book begins as a respectful, candid exploration of his trauma and adversity, as it continues, it takes a rather sharp turn toward caricaturizing our beliefs and disparaging church leaders. This might make some inclined to stop considering David’s perspective altogether.

For example, when describing a conversation with Elder M. Russell Ballard where David was asking questions about homosexuality, Elder Ballard admits that we don’t have many revealed answers (a sentiment that other leaders have expressed): “Well, David, to be honest, I don’t know much about any of this. We don’t really have the answers on what to do about LGBT people. We’ve gone as brethren…and prayed about this, but we’ve never received any answers.” David’s conclusion to that answer was that Elder Ballard was admitting they were being dishonest about their role as prophets, seers, and revelators: “I was surprised by what Elder Ballard seemed to be admitting to me—that they didn’t actually know what God wanted or not. They were making guesses. But they were going to tell everyone the message was from God so they would just follow along without questioning them.”

The apathetic, dismissive approach falls short of discipleship by leaving a void. The more aggressive approach falls short of discipleship by pushing others away. Christ did neither. He purposefully sought out those who were rejected or engaging in behavior that was considered sinful or outside the norm. He approached the woman at the well, a social taboo given her Samaritan background, to minister to her. Even though he acknowledged she was living with a man who wasn’t her husband, he didn’t condemn her. Instead, he taught truth lovingly. He didn’t show apathy toward her choices, but he didn’t berate her either.

Being a disciple means engaging in these conversations with both courtesy and conviction. It means listening to the experiences of others with an open mind and a receptive heart. And it also means keeping truth tied to our efforts to minister.

Pattern 2: Discouraging True Ministry 

Another pattern of response comes from a broad group of Latter-day Saints who graft the modern approach to LGBT+ activism into their ministry. Some are politically involved and actively campaign for doctrine to change, while others take a more pacifist, you-do-you approach. When encountering stories like David’s, they rightly sympathize with the expressed pain, but their actions move beyond sympathy. Instead of anchoring their support in gospel truths, they remove many core components of the gospel from their attempts to connect and comfort. Instead of merely affirming the pain and lending an ear, they join in on disparaging our beliefs, prophets, or modern revelation. In the name of ministering, they share and leave supportive comments on social media posts that undermine doctrine. They discourage gospel discussion on topics like the eternal family and reject parts of the family proclamation.

David’s story commands compassion. His dad pushed him to participate in singing competitions, including American Idol, which he was ultimately grateful for, but which weren’t without their scars; he dealt with toxic family dynamics that split his family into factions; his parents divorced after years of turmoil; and, worst of all, he dealt with feelings of despair so deep that he considered taking his life. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to feel for someone who has gone through as much as David.

But what makes situations like this even more tragic is when the conclusion of that pain is to feel ostracized from or to reject the very thing that will help them heal best: namely, Jesus Christ and the understanding of His atonement found in His restored church.

The most challenging dynamic is when church members feel pressured to participate in this type of support because of language or behavior that mirrors manipulation more than advocacy. For example, a common theme in Devout is David’s mention of the effect our beliefs about marriage and family had on him. In referencing a group of people that walked out of his Christmas concert in Delta, UT (where I lived for a couple of years), after he used it as an opportunity for political advocacy, he said, “If that made them uncomfortable, then fine. I want them to think about why it made them uncomfortable. Maybe because sharing their beliefs led someone like me to consider ending my life, and they just wanted me to pretend to be a happy straight Mormon whom they loved watching on Idol?” Hurt by their lack of enthusiasm for his advocacy, he used our beliefs as a bludgeon. He furthered the idea that if we continue to believe and express our beliefs, we’re going to push people to the brink of desperation. A claim that, thankfully, is contradicted by the data. 

This same dynamic plays out in David’s account of suicidal ideation. I have no doubt that David’s suicidal ideation was genuine. He explains it in detail, and while I’ve never experienced that myself, I could nearly feel the despair as I listened to the audiobook. What a horrible reality to experience. I’ve seen it firsthand in a close friend who tried multiple times to end his life, thankfully to no avail. 

Instead of lacing our support with modern symbols and ideas, we can anchor it in the teachings of Jesus Christ. And not just the parts of His message that, in isolation, could seem to fit in with LGBT+ activism. But the totality of His message—including the sacrifice, responsibility, and love that’s moored to God’s law.

A Christlike Pattern for Responding 

Growing up a sexual minority Latter-day Saint was confusing enough for me. I can’t imagine adding to it the type of mixed messaging and morally confused advocacy that’s so common in the way that members of the Church often respond to experiences of same-sex attraction today. I came out of adolescence with plenty of fears and insecurities, but just enough faith to move forward toward the life I wanted. For me, that led to a life in the Church, an amazing wife, and children of our own. I don’t know that I would’ve been so lucky if I grew up in the environment that exists today.

As disciples of Christ and members of His restored church, we have the duty to love David and people like him without reservation. We also have the duty to love those who will be negatively affected by the message he’s promulgating. Are we loving them by cheering David’s choice to leave the path? Are we loving them by insinuating or explicitly stating that the covenant path is oppressive or harmful? Or that modern prophets are standing in the way of God’s true will for gay people? 

We can’t let emotion decide what’s true. Suffering and hardship—like the kind he experienced—don’t automatically discredit a path. On the reverse, relief or elation—like what he’s described after removing gospel standards from his life—doesn’t automatically vindicate one. 

I doubt David will ever see this. But if he does, I hope he also considers why his advocacy might not be received well by all, not out of hatred for him, but out of concern for our children and loved ones.

More than any other social debate, LGBT+ issues have challenged the idea that we can love those who share a different perspective. And it’s no wonder, with how high the stakes are viewed on both sides. But I reject the idea that in order to love someone, we must either adopt or cheer on their choices. As the late and missed President Holland put it, “As near as I can tell, Christ never once withheld His love from anyone, but He also never once said to anyone, ‘Because I love you, you are exempt from keeping my commandments.’ We are tasked with trying to strike that same sensitive, demanding balance in our lives.”

My aim is to strike that balance. I hope you’ll join me in that goal. 

The post A Devout Sexual Minority’s Response to Archuleta’s “Devout” appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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The Serpent as a Sacred Symbol

In many ancient civilizations, the serpent was a symbol of kings, royalty, and gods. You can see this on the front of the Egyptian Pharaoh’s crown and in the Mesoamerican legend of Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent. 

It is also a symbol of Christ. The scripture story of Moses’ serpent devouring the Egyptians’ serpents conveyed a powerful theological message that Jehovah is the superior serpent. As Latter-day Saint scholar Andrew Skinner points out, this story testifies of Christ’s supremacy over counterfeit powers.

This context makes it deeply significant that Satan appeared to Eve as a serpent in the Garden. He was appearing as a counterfeit of Christ. Genesis teaches: “Now the serpent was more subtle (cunning, crafty, clever) than any beast of the field” (ESV), setting up the serpent as a counterfeit messenger—appearing authoritative while steering souls away from Christ. Moses 4:6 adds, “Satan put it into the heart of the serpent (for he had drawn away many after him,) and he sought also to beguile Eve.” 

The Brass Serpent and the Lesson of Misplaced Worship

The serpent appears again early in the Old Testament. We read in the book of Numbers that “the people spoke against God and Moses,” asking, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we loathe this worthless food” (ESV).

God responded to their lack of faith by sending “fiery” (poisonous) serpents into their camp, and people began dying. When the Israelites repented and asked Moses to pray for deliverance, the Lord instructed Moses to make a “serpent of bronze” and fasten it to the top of a pole so that whoever looked upon it would live.

Why would the Israelites worship something meant to point them to the Lord? Did they forget whom they truly worshiped? Similarly, do we forget whom we really worship and find ourselves idolizing good things that were meant to lead us to Christ?

When the Means Become the End

Some things intended to point us to Christ, such as the Church, the Prophet and apostles, the scriptures, church programs, local priesthood leaders, the For the Strength of Youth pamphlet, and even commandments, can sometimes inadvertently become like the brass serpent. They bring us to Christ, but when we treat them as salvific in and of themselves, we risk idolizing them. The Pharisees exemplified what idolizing commandments looks like.

I’m not suggesting anyone does this deliberately, but in our valiant effort to teach members and children to fully participate in church, follow the prophet, and read the scriptures, we sometimes create a culture where these good and righteous things are assumed to be the end goal instead of the means to the end. 

What Does It Mean That the Church Is “True and Living”?

But don’t we say things like, “The Prophet will never lead us astray,” “The Book of Mormon is the most correct of any book,” and “The Church is the only true Church?” Yes, but those statements require context.

When we say the Church is “true,” what do we mean? It has the ordinances of the Priesthood, is led by Christ through revelation to His servants, and teaches salvific doctrine. It is divine, it is Christ’s Church. Many hear ‘true’ as ‘flawless’: perfectly accurate scriptures, faultless programs, decisions exactly as God would make them. In other words, we interpret “true” as factually binary, all right or all wrong. Many members even feel proud of that idea, believing that all other sects are abominable and all preachers corrupt.

But what happens when the Church changes policies, reverses decisions, or rolls out a less effective program? What do we do when someone says something hurtful, when leaders contradict each other, or when members feel hurt or isolated within church culture?

The problem with this true or false thinking is that when people encounter a problem in the Church, they often feel they have no choice but to leave, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The assumption is that a divine institution should have no human error, turning every mistake into a potential crisis of faith.

D&C 1:30 states that this is the only “true and living” Church. We often define “true” as “unchanging” or “factually accurate,” but the qualifying word “living” complicates that definition. Another meaning of “true” is “to make level, square, balanced, or concentric; to restore to accuracy or form,” which gives the word a more dynamic, living sense. “Truing a wheel,” for example, means adjusting the spokes so it spins straight and steady, free of wobble. 

Perhaps the Church being “true” is like a bicycle wheel, pointed in the right direction, generally straight, yet occasionally needing adjustment. We have to pump flat tires, straighten dents, and realign spokes to keep it true. And as we ride, we make countless small course corrections that keep us moving toward our destination.

To call the Church “living” points to continuing revelation, but it also implies correction, growth, and healing. Recent changes to temple language and partnerships with the NAACP are examples.

The Church is a vehicle to salvation, like a car. Compared with others in the lot, it’s the best one. It’s not perfect or the biggest or fastest, and it has dents to buff out. But it’s reliable, offers upgrades, and has the best safety features. We get weekly gas fill-ups and 24-hour roadside assistance. Each model year improves, and it even includes a heavenly OnStar call button. The best feature may be the eternal warranty.

Prophets, Fallibility, and the Divine Filter

In the Old Testament, the Lord summoned Gideon to free Israel from Midianite oppression. Gideon raised an army of 32,000, but God told him that was too many, since He wanted no one else to take the glory. After reducing the army to 300, they triumphed. Yet the people gave Gideon the credit, saying, “Rule over us, for you have delivered us.” Gideon replied, “I will not rule over you, the Lord shall rule over you.”

Latter-day Saint scholar and writer Terryl Givens, in The Crucible of Doubt, observes that such hero worship is common in human history and even within our Church. He cites the old joke that Catholics claim the Pope is infallible but no one believes it, while Latter-day Saints claim the Prophet is fallible but no one believes it. The notion that prophets are infallible specimens of virtue and perfection is “neither scriptural nor reasonable,” Givens writes.

President Dieter F. Uchtdorf likewise acknowledged, “We openly acknowledge that in nearly 200 years of Church history… there have been some things said and done that could cause people to question…. And, to be perfectly frank, there have been times when members or leaders in the Church have simply made mistakes.”

Elder D. Todd Christofferson added that “not every statement made by a Church leader, past or present, necessarily constitutes doctrine. … Often it represents a personal, though well-considered, opinion, not meant to be official or binding.” 

Scripture reinforces that God speaks to us according to our language and understanding (see 2 Nephi 31 and D&C 1). Revelation filters through human personalities and paradigms. Joseph Smith acknowledged this, and Moroni echoed it on the title page of the Book of Mormon: “If there are faults, they are the mistakes of men.”

So what does divinity look like filtered through mortals? I find the metaphor of stained glass fitting. Depending on its color and design, the light passing through is beautiful and divine, but still filtered. The filtering makes it unique. Just because there’s glass doesn’t mean the light isn’t divine. Consider how divine inspiration manifests differently through the “stained glass” of Neal A. Maxwell, Brigham Young, Sheri Dew, Jeffrey R. Holland, Gordon B. Hinckley, Bruce R. McConkie, Dieter F. Uchtdorf, or Sharon Eubank, and through your own ward members.

God uses flawed vessels because that’s all He has, but also to teach humility and redirect our worship. He told Joseph Smith in D&C 121: 1, “For unto this end have I raised you up, that I might show forth my wisdom through the weak things of the earth.” Elder Jeffrey R. Holland reminded us, “Imperfect people are all God has ever had to work with… and when you see imperfection, remember that the limitation is not in the divinity of the work.” 

The Lord built checks and balances into His system, councils, quorums, companionships, presidencies, and marriages. Elder Boyd K. Packer noted, “These procedures protect the work from the individual weaknesses apparent in all of us.” 

Two Common Errors in Faith

We tend to err in two ways. First, we don’t take the prophet, the Church, or the scriptures seriously enough. Many of us fail to fully embrace the blessings of following the Brethren, participating in Church, and feasting on scripture. President Nelson warned that “we should not put question marks where the Prophet has put periods.” 

The second error is what New Testament scholar Darrell Bock calls “brittle fundamentalism,” assuming the Church, prophets, or scriptures must be perfect, then losing faith when confronted with imperfection. If we think the Church must be all true or all false, it’s easy to walk away when we find flaws. 

The Value of Honest Questions

To those wrestling with doubts, your questions are valid. There is nothing wrong with you. Questions are how we learn. Nearly every revelation in the Doctrine and Covenants began with a question. The First Vision began with a question.

Uncertainty is uncomfortable, but sincere inquiry is part of discipleship. Answers may come quickly, slowly, or not at all, which is why faith is essential to spiritual growth. Joseph Smith taught that “a religion that does not require the sacrifice of all things never has power sufficient to produce the faith necessary unto life and salvation.” Perhaps part of that sacrifice is placing our complaints and unanswered questions on the altar, trusting that God values honest wrestling as much as easy belief.

Creating a Culture Safe for Seekers

A living church must also be a safe place for sincere seekers. If faith is meant to grow through honest inquiry rather than brittle certainty, then questions should not be treated as threats. In practice, however, some members quietly fear that voicing doubts will brand them as disloyal or spiritually weak.

Yet the Restoration itself models a different pattern. Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf taught, “Inquiry is the birthplace of testimony. … Asking questions isn’t a sign of weakness; it’s a precursor of growth.” Faith that cannot tolerate sincere questions risks confusing devotion with defensiveness.

Mature discipleship makes room for complexity without abandoning commitment. Over time, faith may move from simplicity to complexity and, ideally, return to a deeper, humbler simplicity (see Hafen, Faith is Not Blind). Creating space for that process does not weaken the Church. It honors the fact that a true and living faith must also be patient, charitable, and resilient.

Triangulating Truth

We must utilize each of these sources rather than idolize them.

Choosing to Believe

I’ve chosen the gospel of Christ as the reality on which I’ll depend for salvation. I believe this Church is the best vehicle to reach that destination. I believe because I choose to, not because of flawless logic. I have felt the Holy Spirit confirm the truth to me on many occasions.

My testimony waxes and wanes, as everyone’s does. Sometimes it nears certainty; other times it leans on faith alone. Yet even in weakness, it calls me to keep trying, to keep seeing light through stained glass.

The post When Symbols Become Idols: Remembering What Points Us to Christ appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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There are several stark ironies in my life. First, I grew up in an active Latter-day Saint family in a small farm town in southern Idaho. So, my upbringing was about as conservative as you can imagine. Yet, I got a PhD in psychology, which is about as liberal a field as you can imagine. Second, I’m still an active member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, while I’ve had numerous family members and friends leave the Church. Yet, I’m the one who is in psychology, arguably the least religious field in academia. Third, I study deconversion, so I know all the reasons people leave religion. Yet, I have little if any motivation to leave myself. Fourth, I’m one of the leading researchers of adolescent religious development in the world, yet I struggle to raise my own kids in the Church. Fifth, I’ve been in the field of psychology for two and a half decades as a developmental psychologist, so I should understand growth and change. Yet, I have struggled mightily with my own mental health and relationships. Sixth, I have spoken and written about how to navigate faith crises, yet I am still struggling with my own faith.

One reason I have no motivation to leave is that I have adequately applied my heart, head, and hands to my faith journey, as articulated in a four-part series of essays I wrote previously with my colleague Ed Gantt. These essays are extensive, so I won’t repeat what is said there. But they capture a lot of the reasons why I have not left the Church. 

One major reason I am not motivated to leave the Church, as pointed out in our essays, is that I focus on primary questions and let go of secondary questions. Elder Corbridge beautifully described this distinction in a BYU devotional. I have studied why people leave religion (deconversion) for about a decade, so I know all the secondary questions. But I don’t spend much time and energy on them. This is largely because of what I describe in my faith journey essays. And part of it is, I have my hands full with the primary questions, which are essentially the pillars of a testimony. Here they are:

1. Is there a God? 
2. Is Jesus the Christ?
3. Was Joseph Smith a prophet?
4. Is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints the true church?
5. Is the Book of Mormon the word of God?

Let’s start with, is there a God? I really believe there is a God, but I have several barriers that have made it hard for me to feel His presence and love. First, although I grew up in a wonderful family that I love, we aren’t the most emotionally intelligent (at least speaking for myself). We learned how to use our heads more than our hearts. Second, I made that worse by getting a PhD and becoming a professor. My career is very focused on logic and observable evidence. Third, I have struggled with my mental health. In a recent study I conducted with my colleagues and students, we showed that spirituality and mental health are bidirectionally linked. That is, it isn’t just that spirituality protects people from mental health challenges, but in turn, having such challenges can hinder spirituality. So, I feel my mental illness has made it harder than usual for me to have spiritual experiences. Fourth, it seems like my weakness and sin have often been like an umbrella, blocking me from the rays of light coming down from God. Fifth, more importantly, I have lived with shame as my harmful constant companion. Shame blocks me from feeling love from myself, others, and God. 

Next, is Jesus the Christ? One of my big challenges here is that it is hard, with my modern, Western, scientific mind, to envision having a relationship with someone whom I can’t observe with my five senses. Also, the barriers above for me feeling God’s presence and love are also barriers to me experiencing the Atonement of Christ. In particular, shame is basically a denial of the Atonement of Christ. Sort of like, I know you paid for my sins, but I prefer to keep them and beat myself with them. In short, even though I really want to believe in Christ, I have struggled in my relationship with Him and in experiencing the healing and enabling powers of His Atonement. 

Yet, I love all things Christian. I am a junkie of The Chosen. I’m all in on that personable Jesus! I feel the Spirit so powerfully in many of the most beloved scenes. I’m also obsessed with Christian music, particularly Christian rock. Most of my listening time these days is devoted to Christian music. I feel uplifted and connected to God, Jesus, and the Spirit. Many of the lyrics echo my struggles, triumphs, and the desires of my heart. So, although I struggle in my relationship with Jesus, I seem to yearn for it. 

Next, was Joseph Smith a prophet? Most of the issues people have with Joseph Smith probably qualify as secondary questions, so I’m not very interested in those. I’ll evaluate him based on his two major contributions, which are restoring the Church and translating the Book of Mormon, discussed further below. If those are legitimate, then he was a prophet.

Despite these struggles, I love the Church and the gospel and hold onto faith and hope that they are true. And my meager but sincere attempts to “Hear Him” seem to be bearing some fruit, as attested by my spiritual experience described earlier. Furthermore, the social sciences data regarding our church is overwhelmingly positive. One book about youth has a chapter called “Mormon Envy” (a Freudian play on words). The researchers were so blown away by how amazing our youth were compared to most other youth in the U.S., and my colleagues and I at BYU have largely replicated these findings with newer data, better measures, and a larger sample of Latter-day Saint youth. So, with all our flaws, we seem to be doing something right.

The final reason I am not motivated to leave the Church is that I really want and even need it to be true. First, I want to honor my ancestors. I have Latter-day Saint pioneer heritage on both sides of my family. Maybe this seems like lame conformity, but I’m not the only one who thinks it’s important. Second, my parents both died of cancer. It is unacceptable that death is the end. Third, as noted earlier, I am stumbling my way through life. My own will and intellect have been good for my career, but have fallen short in other areas of my life, such as my mental health and relationships. I’ve come to the end of myself to the point of turning my life over to God and accepting Jesus as my Savior. Fourth, I got to the point of realizing that no amount of observable or rational evidence in mortality will ever give sure answers to any of the questions above. So, as Elder Renlund encouraged, I decided to be inclined towards faith. I know, critics of the Church will point to Occam’s razor. Be careful, it’s a double-edged razor. It isn’t any simpler believing in evolution as the origin of man than divine creation. It isn’t any simpler believing Joseph Smith was insane, or a genius, or a copycat, than believing the Book of Mormon was translated by revelation. It seems that either way we go when answering these primary questions, whether “Yes” or “No,” requires a faith of sorts. So, I’ll give the benefit of the doubt to the affirmative answers.

The post Confessions of a Deconversion Researcher: A Scholar’s Journey of Faith appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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Faith is hard. One of my favorite writers is Flannery O’Connor, an American Southern Gothic novelist and short story writer. O’Connor was a devout Catholic, and her published prayer journals and letters give us a glimpse into her life of faith. In a letter to a lifelong friend and pen pal, Louise Abbot, O’Connor responds to what must have been Abbot describing a trial of faith, saying: 

I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe. I know what torment this is, but I can only see it, in myself anyway, as the process by which faith is deepened. A faith that just accepts is a child’s faith and all right for children, but eventually you have to grow religiously, as [in] every other way, though some never do.

What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe. If you feel you can’t believe, you must at least do this: keep an open mind. Keep it open toward faith, keep wanting it, keep asking for it, and leave the rest to God.

It is interesting that she both acknowledges that for some, faith can be excruciating—the cross itself—but also the way by which faith is deepened. In other words, this is how it is supposed to work.

Many I know who have struggled with faith are unsure how to initiate these kinds of conversations with friends or seek out literature that will help them find the truth. Perhaps they have reached out to loved ones about their doubts, and have received dismissive or surface-level answers like “just read your scriptures more” or “It sounds like you’ve been reading anti-material.” Often they have been convinced by nonbelievers or former believers that any faith-positive source is biased or deceptive, or that once the “shelf is broken,” there is no going back. 

Too often, we treat church meetings as the place where every spiritual concern must be resolved. But not every question belongs in the chapel pew. Some conversations about faith are sacred—and require a different setting, a different pace, and a different kind of attention.

Faith is hard, and we should normalize the challenges, and ebbs and flows, and questions that come along with a life of devotion. No believer goes through mortality without crying out to God in agony of a great loss, or feeling silence from the heavens, or seeking out greater meaning or understanding of God’s plan. After all, this is part of the process. 

But how we go about normalizing these struggles matters.  In our efforts to normalize any challenge, we risk romanticizing it—or worse, reinforcing it. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the movement to normalize mental health challenges. 

Mental health has become the lens through which we view nearly everything. Diagnoses appear in social media bios. Therapyspeak—words like “toxic,” “trauma,” and “boundaries”—has seeped into casual conversation, often stripped of clinical meaning. Employers hand out mental health toolkits, colleges offer petting zoos during finals, and celebrities tout the virtues of therapy for every relationship hurdle.

But things aren’t getting better. Symptoms of anxiety and depression continue to rise, especially among adolescent girls. Even emotionally stable teens now pathologize normal ups and downs, often self-diagnosing via TikTok. Gallup reports that Americans’ self-assessed mental health is the worst it’s been in over two decades. Suicide rates have increased by 30% in the last 20 years. Parents are more fearful than ever—reluctant to let their children roam the neighborhood, convinced that every stranger at Target might be a kidnapper.

We are more anxious, more fragile, and more volatile. This culture of constant rumination and performative validation is not serving us well. Bringing in “faith crisis” to every church meeting risks creating the same culture of unhealthy navel-gazing in our spiritual lives.

First, the right setting: In The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we are often taught that the most important part of church attendance is taking the sacrament and renewing our baptismal covenants. President Dallin H. Oaks has taught that we attend church to serve (not to be served) and teaching manuals such as Preach My Gospel for missionaries and Teaching, No Greater Call for general membership emphasize that our primary purpose should be to invite others to come unto Christ. I would humbly suggest that the right setting for a deep dive into questions and doubts is probably not in our regular Sunday meetings. 

This is somewhat tricky. Avoiding hard questions might leave struggling members isolated—or lead them to those who’ve left the covenant path and want others to follow.

On the other hand, among the members and visitors at church each week are likely widows, those who are caring for elderly parents, have sick or disabled children, have lost jobs, have mental health issues, and myriad other challenges. These people come to church for the balm of Gilead that is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Our niche Joseph Smith historical questions, while they may feel immediate and pressing to us, can detract from that important purpose.

Flannery O’Connor chose faith, even when it didn’t feel effortless. During her graduate school years, she attended Mass daily. She journaled about the tension between her desire for God and her sense of distance from Him. “My thoughts are all elsewhere,” she confessed. But she showed up anyway. She didn’t wait for certainty before practicing devotion. When prayer felt elusive, she turned to writing, pouring out her longings, her doubts, and her imperfect love into beautifully wrought prayers. She didn’t pretend to be more faithful than she was—she simply brought her full self to God and asked for help.

We can do the same. In times of spiritual struggle, our offering may be small—a prayer uttered in hope rather than confidence, a Sunday School comment made despite nagging doubt, a verse of scripture read with an open, aching heart. But small offerings matter. They are expressions of our desire to stay in a relationship with God. And that desire, acted on, can become the seed of faith.

The right people and the right sources also matter. When we’re struggling with mental health, we’re careful—ideally—not to rely on unqualified influencers or unreliable forums for advice. The same care should apply when we’re facing serious gospel questions. Not every voice online—or even in our social circles—is equipped to help. President Russell M. Nelson has warned us against “increasing (our) doubts by rehearsing them with other doubters.”

For some, the right person might be a trusted family member, a close friend, a ministering sister or brother—someone who can listen without panic and respond without platitudes. For others, it might be a mentor, a bishop, or someone with experience navigating similar questions. But we also have to prepare to be that kind of person for others—to receive their questions with love and patience rather than fear or defensiveness.

The Church provides a helpful resource called Helping Others with Questions in the Gospel Topics Library, which outlines practical ways to support loved ones in faith crises. Outside of official church resources, organizations like Mormonr or FAIR Latter-day Saints offer thoughtful, research-based responses to common questions and criticisms. These sources won’t perfectly answer every question—but they are striving to be both spiritually grounded and intellectually responsible.

It’s not wrong to hear out questions or criticisms. But we shouldn’t let them monopolize the conversation in our hearts and minds. Doubt may be a part of our path—but we get to choose who we walk with, and who we let guide us, and how much space we want to give to those doubts.

Flannery O’Connor was not only a gospel seeker, but also a guide. Her own wrestling made her a compassionate companion to others in their searching. She never claimed to have perfect faith—only a determined one. Her writing continues to offer a kind of spiritual hospitality to those who want to believe but aren’t sure how.

In that way, O’Connor mirrors the very work of the gospel: inviting the wounded, the weary, and the wondering to come unto Christ, even when we ourselves are prone to wander. If we can become the kind of believers who sit with others in that space—without panic, without platitudes, but with patience and love—then our faith, however imperfect, becomes not only our anchor but someone else’s lifeline.

Faith is hard. But as with most hard things, it is transformative, refining us in the very hardest of times to become who only God can see in us. That is the work of a disciple—not to have all the answers, but to keep walking with God, and help others do the same.

The post The Hidden Cost of Normalizing Doubt appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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When I was nineteen, I thought I understood what a mission would be like. I had seen the videos, heard the stories, and imagined the glow of faithful, fulfilling service. But a few weeks into the field, I was already disoriented. It was harder than I’d ever expected—physically, emotionally, spiritually. That uncomfortable realization—that reality wasn’t what I expected—turned out to be one of the greatest gifts of my life.

I now recognize that moment as a kind of Garden of Eden experience: a step out of innocence, into awareness. Into a world where nothing was automatic anymore. And it’s the kind of transition we all make—sometimes in faith, sometimes in relationships, and sometimes in the middle of a quiet Sunday School class.

The Garden of Eden is a story that evokes a number of questions. In considering that story, we sometimes get hung up on particulars like the exact location of the garden; the relationship between the fall and death; God’s language around male-female relationships; and more. These questions can be interesting, but they are peripheral to the intentions of the story. In the story of the Garden of Eden, believers are presented with a model for how we develop as human beings.

Psychologists have long recognized that human development unfolds in stages. Erik Erikson, for example, mapped out a series of life phases—each with a key challenge that can lead either to growth or regression. Others, like Lawrence Kohlberg and James Fowler, explored how our moral reasoning and faith mature over time. While each model differs, they all affirm the same truth: healthy development requires that we move through periods of disorientation, adjustment, and deeper understanding.

I suggest that the Garden of Eden story is the best possible framework for understanding how we develop, and it is relevant across all areas of our lives. The basic contours of the story are

1. A time of innocence, where participation in a system feels automatic;

2. An awakening to awareness that reality is more than what we previously understood, in ways that are beyond our current ability to process well; and

3. Decisions in the direction of growth and development to function well in reality, or in the direction of maladaptive coping strategies that keep us from functioning well in reality.

As an example, I look back on my experience as a missionary. I grew up in a time when the Church was producing emotionally satisfying audiovisual materials to promote gospel concepts. Among those materials was a 1990 video called “Labor of Love,” which depicted missionary service as a clean and comfortable series of positive experiences. With that as a reference point, I entered missionary service in Brazil in 1993, and quickly found myself shocked and overwhelmed by missionary life that was stressful, frustrating, and physically exhausting. Before I entered the mission field, my future mission experience had only existed in theory, informed by positive stories that had been told to me. My commitment to my mission had been automatic, but now I had new information that led to daily decision points of actively choosing. I was no longer in the garden, where problems and challenges and irony (the “thorns and thistles” described to Adam and Eve by God) exist only in theory.

This process of leaving the garden and then facing these choices is one we face in church callings, but also many other areas of life: marriage, child-rearing, university studies, military service, career, and more. For most of our significant life experiences, there is a process of bringing to the experience an automatic commitment based on our paradigm of what the experience will be; then seeing differences between reality and our paradigm; then facing developmental crossroads in how we choose to respond.

In the Garden of Eden story, there is another aspect of awareness that greatly determines whether our departure from a garden of life experience becomes developmentally positive or negative. In restoration scripture, we read “And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they had been naked…”. In other words, they had become aware that there was a gap in their understanding of themselves and the world around them.

The way that we become aware of these gaps in our perspective matters. Our restoration understanding of Adam and Eve’s new awareness of their nakedness is that it was presented to them as something shameful. To represent Satan as a serpent in the garden is an excellent teaching tool, because his objective was to poison Adam and Eve using the venom of shame as they made their transition to new awareness. In his narrative, their nakedness meant that they were lacking and deficient. And worse, it was God who had allowed them to live in the garden in ignorance of that shameful situation. This was the venom of the accusing serpent in the garden.

I do not mean to suggest here that shame is always a bad thing to experience. I know of a number of situations where a sense of shame has been the catalyst for positive personal transformation. In some cases, shame is the only thing that will lead a person to reverse from a destructive path they have chosen. But when facing a common Garden of Eden-like developmental crossroads—the simple experience of being awakened to gaps in our paradigm and expectations—shame is not helpful or appropriate.

“Your mission experience is not what you envisioned, and that means one or both of two possibilities: you are stupid and clueless and live in a fantasy world, or you were deceived by people who gave you the wrong impression of the missionary experience.”

Or,

“Your mission experience is not what you envisioned, but making adjustments to our paradigms and expectations for our life experiences is normal. There is tremendous growth available to us in the process, and in your mission experience, the Savior is eager to lead you through that process over time.”

The first message reflects the patterns of shaming that are found in much of the critical messaging from disaffected members and former members of the Church. In critical spaces, a simple developmental crossroads, like my becoming aware of the humanity and shortcomings of prominent people in scripture and church history, is framed in shame: the difficulty of making adjustments to my paradigm is a sign that I am deficient or I have been wronged. I’m hurting, so obviously it’s my fault or someone else’s fault. Either I or the Church needs to be blamed and shamed. When our loved ones leave the covenant path and isolate themselves defensively, that is a good indicator that they have internalized narratives of shame. Letting go of that poison will allow them to reconnect with us and, in some cases, resume spiritual development. But that can be a long process of returning to their developmental crossroads and making a different choice.

How does this apply to our gospel questioning? It is clear that not all questions are equal. Some are designed to keep people developmentally stuck. In critical spaces, gospel questioning is infused with shaming, accusatory venom. Consider the form of each of these “questions”:

“Obviously, good people do x. So, why do church leaders do y?” (an accusation/insinuation disguised as a question)

“I’m totally open to accepting the Church’s teachings, as soon as unresolvable brain teaser x is resolved to my satisfaction. How do you resolve x?” (a false commitment presented as a question)

“I’m not really willing to apply myself to do the work to understand issue x in depth. So, can you explain it to me in a way that meets all my expectations, validates me, and fits within my worldview?” (an impossible demand presented as a question)

None of these are really questions. They are shaming, dishonesty, and entitlement presented in the form of questions. Sadly, some online spaces reinforce patterns of questioning that are less about curiosity and more about blame.

“I have studied x, y, z materials on this gospel topic. Are these the best possible resources, or are there some I’m missing? My understanding is _____. Is that accurate, or is there a better way to understand this concept?”

“Are there aspects of my worldview, my life experiences, or my personality that are causing me to see this issue the way I do? Are there other emotional or cognitive lenses through which I can examine this information that would open up new possible understandings?”

Here, questioning comes from genuine openness and curiosity. There is no sense of shame over a lack of understanding. I come to my questioning with a positive view that with new resources, there might be a need to make further adjustments to thinking, and that is okay. It is a normal process of spiritual and intellectual growth. And if someone is not engaged in that same process of seeking, it does not mean that they are deficient in any way, or that they are being “kept in the dark,” or any number of other grievance narratives that are inappropriately applied to normal human experience.

This is the developmental crossroads of gospel questioning. Without an awareness of the choices available to us, we can be led to narrow and cynical biases and undertake our gospel questioning like a fearful, wounded animal. With awareness, we can approach our gospel questioning with the bias of charity, free of the poison of shame.

And to be biased by charity is what it means to be truly open-minded.

In our own gospel wrestling, may we choose that bias of charity. It doesn’t just help us grow—it keeps us connected to one another, and to the God who waits for us outside the garden, ready to walk with us again.

The post What the Garden of Eden Teaches About Gospel Questions appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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This is the 3rd article in a series of 4.  Part 1: Navigating Your Faith Journey: Questioning is Good, Part 2: Navigating Your Faith Journey: Use Your Heart, Part 4: Navigating Your Faith Journey: Use Your Hands

In this article, we provide suggestions for how to use your head more effectively in your faith journey. This is the third essay in a series on Navigating Your Faith Journey. In the first essay, we made the case that questioning is not only acceptable but can be helpful to your faith journey. Then we promised three follow-up essays in the series where we would provide guidance on how to go about navigating your faith journey productively using your heart, head, and hands. In this third essay, we will focus on the role of the head, meaning your thoughts, intellect, logic, and reasoning. Obviously, separating humans into hearts, heads, and hands is a bit artificial since we aren’t really composed of discrete parts or pieces. Still, it does provide a framework for organizing various aspects of our lives that are relevant to navigating our faith journeys. As such, we can generally imagine that the heart is what provides the power, while the head provides the direction. (If you remember the car analogy from Essay 2, the heart is the engine while the head is the steering wheel.) So, in this essay, we will provide ideas to help you make sure you are going in the right direction on your faith journey.

There is irony underlying the tips we will provide here for using your head to navigate your faith journey. They all come from our discipline of psychology (or at least psychology borrowed them from other disciplines, such as philosophy and science), and psychology is one of the least religious academic disciplines. Nonetheless, we are going to show you how to use certain tools of psychology to help you on your faith journey. We are confident in this approach because these tools have helped us on our faith journeys, and we are not the only ones who have applied these tools to the successful navigation of faith journeys. For example, books such as “Seekers Wanted” by Anthony Sweat, “Planted” by Patrick Mason, and “Wrestling with the Restoration” by Steven Harper articulate similar ideas.

How might source criticism help you navigate your faith journey? When you encounter information about the gospel or the Church, we suggest you first evaluate the quality and reliability of the source. For example, here are some questions you might ask about the source (the same questions we ask about sources relevant to our field of psychology):

1. Who said or wrote the information? Do they have relevant training, education, experience, or expertise? If not, they are likely a less trustworthy source of information on that topic. For example, many of the most well-known critics of the Church have very little, if any, training in relevant areas such as theology, philosophy, and history. Also, what are their biases? For example, many of the most well-known critics of the Church are disgruntled former members. As we will discuss more below, objectivity is a myth. Often, people questioning the Church will seek “objective” or neutral sources, but no such sources exist. It is impossible for humans to be objective; we can’t step outside of our experience to be entirely neutral and unbiased. Instead, look for sources that are fair and honest. Being fair means they listen to other perspectives, seek to understand the strengths and limitations of their own ideas and those of others, and are willing to question and even modify their own views. Being honest means they are sincerely pursuing the truth, trying to convey the truth with integrity, and acknowledging their own biases.

2. What was the venue or outlet for the information? Is it a reputable and credible venue or outlet? Does the venue or outlet have a review process; in other words, are there gatekeepers to ensure the quality of the information? For example, anyone can post anything they want on the internet, but not everyone can publish anything they want in a newspaper, magazine, or book. Those venues have editors.

3. How old is the information? Old information might still be good, but it depends. Is it still relevant and accurate? Has the information been revised or challenged in important ways by more recent work?

4. Is it a primary or secondary source? You may be familiar with the game “telephone,” where people line up and the first person says something, and then that information gets passed down the line. Invariably, the information the last person gets is quite different from the original. If someone quotes someone else, particularly if they paraphrase, it is always good practice to find the original source before putting too much stock in the information.

The second tool is Contextualization. In addition to critically evaluating the sources of information we receive, we also need to appropriately and adequately contextualize the information. Otherwise, it can be misleading. There are several important ways in which we need to contextualize information we receive regarding the gospel and the Church.

1. Textual context. Often, information used by critics of the Church comes from obscure quotes from scriptures or modern-day church leaders taken out of the context in which they were originally used. For example, some critics of the Church have taken a quote by Elder Oaks out of context to suggest that he said we should always accept anything a church leader ever says as true, even if it is not. In fact, however, Elder Oaks (who was speaking to historians) was suggesting that not everything that is true about a person’s life is always useful to share. He wasn’t saying that leaders are always above any correction, only that historians need to be thoughtful about what they share about the people they write about—that they should strive to see the person in context, to not focus on one flaw or misbehavior and use it to define the whole person. Interestingly, in those same comments, Elder Oaks spoke about the importance of being skeptical in our reading and being sensitive to bias in our informational sources.

2. Historical context. We have the tendency to interpret historical events through the lens of our current experience. But historians caution that other historical ages are like other cultures; that is, they often did things differently back then. That doesn’t mean we can’t think critically about things that happened; it just means our own worldview for doing so is insufficient. We also need to take into consideration their worldview and context. One way in which we can do this is by stepping back and reflecting on what we learn without rendering immediate judgment. Doing this gives us some emotional distance and allows for a more balanced examination. This is especially the case when the information we encounter is negative or surprising. This doesn’t mean that we must be totally dispassionate, at least not in the way objective neutrality would require. Feelings and values can be important in helping us understand and evaluate history. Still, we should rationally evaluate the information we encounter in light of our values and the values of those presenting the information. It also seems best to view historical events in a spirit of charity where we give others the “benefit of the doubt,” especially when they are the target of criticisms that may be one-sided. Being charitable means assuming others are acting in good faith—at least until we find evidence to the contrary. For example, critics often show undue concern that Joseph Smith looked for treasures using seer stones and married teenage women. Our knee-jerk reaction to such things might be bewilderment and disgust. But neither of these things was unusual for that time in which he lived.

3. Church context. It is also important to understand if information is primarily at the level of the gospel, the Church, or church culture. The restored gospel of Jesus Christ is 100% true. We readily testify to that. And everyone can receive direct revelation from God that it is true. Typically, however, the gospel comes to us from God and Christ by way of mortal men and women. Often this occurs within the organization of the Church. In other words, that perfect gospel sometimes loses integrity as it passes through human minds and hands on its way to us. In fact, the Title Page of the Book of Mormon acknowledges this when it states: “And now, if there are faults they are the mistakes of men; wherefore, condemn not the things of God, that ye may be found spotless at the judgment-seat of Christ.” The gospel is perfect, but the scriptures and the Church, and any other medium reliant on mortal efforts, are imperfect. To this point, Elder Dale G. Renlund taught: “If you receive what the Lord’s Church offers, you can be perfected in Christ before His Church is perfected, if it ever is. His goal is to perfect you, not His Church” (footnote 35). Still, the Church plays an important role in delivering the gospel to us. If we are thoughtful, we can still hone in on core gospel truths or doctrines. Lastly, our encounters with the gospel often come in our local congregations and our homes. Yet another layer of human minds and hands the gospel passes through, whereby it loses even more integrity. We might call these “folk religions,” and technically, there are as many folk religions as there are members of the Church! Thus, do not confuse the way your Ward or family teaches or practices the gospel, much less the way you yourself do, with being THE GOSPEL or THE CHURCH. Such naivety is easily challenged by attending a different Ward or getting married, where you encounter other interpretations of the gospel and the Church. These three layers are important to remember because the further down the information is, the more prone it is to error.

How might cognitive flexibility help you on your faith journey? In the first essay in this series (on Questioning), we outlined the stages of faith (using the Hafens’ model): (1) simplicity, (2) complexity, and (3) simplicity beyond complexity. In Stage 1, people figuratively see the world as black and white and thus have minimal cognitive flexibility. But at some point, for many people, that way of thinking is no longer adequate, because the world generally isn’t black and white. As Jean Piaget, a pioneer in developmental psychology, explained, when encountering new information, we can either assimilate that information into our current ways of thinking or accommodate it by developing new ways of thinking. According to him, cognitive development happens as people are pushed to develop more and more sophisticated ways of thinking. When people have experiences with or encounter new information about the gospel or the Church that cannot easily be assimilated into their current way of thinking, some choose to abandon the gospel or the Church, but they could instead learn to accommodate. Since simplistic ways of seeing the world are often unrealistic, accommodation means being open to seeing the world as it is; in other words, having cognitive flexibility. One common example noted in our first essay is the simplistic notion that church leaders are infallible. If we hear something a church leader did that seems wrong, our immediate reaction might be to assume that either the information is false, or the Church isn’t true—it’s an either/or situation. So, we might immediately dismiss the information to retain belief in the Church. But with more evidence of the truthfulness of the information, we may feel compelled to abandon the Church. But what if, like in psychology classes, the correct answer is “both” or “it depends.” In this case, the information could be correct AND the Church could still be true. But only if we have cognitive flexibility.

The fifth and final tool is Questioning Assumptions. This is, perhaps, the most difficult tool we have to offer, but also the one that may prove to be the most helpful. As we just noted, every human perspective is a perspective from somewhere. In other words, the way in which we make sense of and experience the world, and even the questions we ask about our faith journeys, arise out of some very basic assumptions we have about the world, ourselves, and others. These assumptions concern our basic sense of how we can know things to be true or false, how things ought to be, and what interpretations or understandings of events “just make sense.” Because they are so basic to our experience of the world, these assumptions are also mostly taken for granted, and thus, we seldom examine or clarify them to ourselves. This does not mean that our most basic assumptions cannot be accessed, evaluated, or critically examined. In fact, it is vital that we not only take careful stock of the assumptions that others seem to be operating from to better evaluate the arguments they make and the evidence they present, but we also need to carefully think through our own assumptions to know why we find some ideas particularly troubling or persuasive.

In summary, we have provided you with five tools to help you on your faith journey: (1) Source Criticism, (2) Contextualization, (3) Cognitive Flexibility, (4) Myth Buster, and (5) Questioning Assumptions. As we noted at the start, these are tools that scholars and psychological researchers like us use in our research and writing. They are tools we teach our students. But we have noticed they have also helped us and many others navigate our faith journeys “using our heads.” For faith and reason are not in conflict, but are mutually reinforcing, and both are necessary for us to find our way forward.

The post Navigating Your Faith Journey: Use Your Head appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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 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.

The post Doubt in the Digital Age: How a Perfect Storm of Random Forces Inflated the CES Letter Beyond Its Merits appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Yet, Heretic, which features Hugh Grant in a maniacal role that surprises those who still most closely associate him with titles like Sense and Sensibility and Two Weeks’ Notice, has left many viewers assuming that the film’s thesis is voiced by its villain. That thesis is that all religion is manmade and fundamentally about control.

The film starts with a hook that writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (A Quiet Place) apparently wrote a decade before embarking on the rest of the film, the idea of a pair of sister missionaries being drawn into a home to discuss religion with someone who turns out to have not only ideas that will challenge them spiritually, but plans that will threaten their very lives. The film acknowledges, but side-steps, the missionary safety rule about having another female in the house in order to teach with a lie from Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant) that his wife is in the other room baking pie. 

The sense of foreboding is immediately palpable, but the horror tropes that increasingly alert the audience that this is a bad situation accelerate alongside an increasingly adversarial discussion from Mr. Reed on the problems he sees with religion. The two run so much in parallel, in fact, that it begins to feel like the fear these young women are clearly feeling is a result of having their beliefs criticized and not the fear for their physical safety. 

They seem to be as much afraid that he is right about their church as they are that he might hurt them, the equating of which is a little insulting considering how much criticism missionaries and members of the Church, in general, hear constantly (his arguments are older news than he thinks) and how much unchecked violence happens against women all the time. In some ways, it would be a male privilege to hear this oration and be more afraid of the ideas than of the locks on every door and the proximity of the unhinged gentleman who clearly has nefarious intent. 

It calls to mind the recent interview from The Graham Norton Show that went viral when actress Saoirse Ronan sat with an otherwise all-male panel listening to them discuss the ridiculousness of self-defense tactics like using the butt of your phone as a weapon. Actor Paul Mescal’s sarcastic response was, “Who’s actually going to think about that? If someone attacks me, I’m not going to go—phone!” The other men in the room proceeded to laugh and act out the supposed silliness of that thought process before Ronan interrupted them by saying, “That’s what girls have to think about all the time,” which left the others speechless and the females in the audience clapping their agreement.

Yes, it was unusual to give the “baddie” nearly half the film for his big “why I did it” monologue, but it wasn’t the only reason that the audience came away from the film feeling the filmmakers must agree with him. 

Despite a more nuanced than usual depiction of Latter-day Saint characters (sloppy and incorrect references and terminology notwithstanding, CLICK HERE for a great fact checking piece), the film ultimately fell into the trap that seems inevitable when a film weighing atheism against belief is made by non-believers. There is an underlying assumption that a person of faith is just a person who hasn’t suffered enough to realize they’re an atheist yet. 

I don’t think most faithful people assume that all atheists secretly believe in God, but it seems to be the irrevocable mainstream view that if you push a faithful person far enough, they will ultimately admit that their belief was a front all along. 

It is perfectly verbalized by Anthony Hopkins as Sigmund Freud in the 2023 film Freud’s Last Session, an imagined meeting between C.S. Lewis and Freud in the final days of the psychoanalyst’s life. In their day together, an air raid siren sounds, and as they evacuate to a shelter, C.S. Lewis reacts with terror (and what we would identify as PTSD), and later on, Freud criticizes him for showing so much fear: “Where was your great faith? Where was your precious joy in meeting your beloved Creator? Disappeared. Why? Because you know, beyond all your self-protective lies and your fairy tales that he does not exist.”

Even that film, which had such great potential for a debate on equal footing, ultimately came down much more heavily on Freud’s side of the argument, though C.S. Lewis is perhaps the world’s most famous modern example of a person whose life took him the other direction from atheism to faith. 

Heretic, too, as it left some of the lectures behind and began to slap together some blood and gore to appease the genre, wouldn’t let anyone keep their faith. The two missionary protagonists seem to have differing levels of conviction from the beginning. Sister Barnes is a worldly wise and subtly skeptical counterpoint to the endearing naivety of her companion, Sister Paxton, who continues to thank Mr. Reed for his time and his interesting thoughts while trying to flee. 

When (spoiler alert) Sister Paxton is the only one of the two left and bleeding out together with Mr. Reed, who has finally been dealt a deserved blow, he uncharacteristically asks her to pray for them. And even in this moment with the threat so much disarmed, she says, “Prayer doesn’t work” and then describes a scientific experiment that proved it (as though science, and a single experiment no less, would be the thing to trust on such a topic). “Lots of my friends were disappointed when they heard that,” she says, “But I don’t know why. I think … it’s beautiful that people pray for each other, even though we all probably know, deep down, it doesn’t make a difference.”

In the end, I saw this film as a call to action for filmmakers of faith. Not to make movies just to clapback at something like Heretic, but to express cinematically the effect and experience of faith, truly felt, even or especially in times of greatest pain and sorrow. It is clear that there is an overwhelming feeling among those in the mainstream media that belief toward unbelief is the only direction the current actually flows and those of us who still believe just haven’t made it far enough down the river yet. 

Little do they know that the very being whose name Christians carry suffered so severely and, in His final moments, called out to, rather than denied, His Father in Heaven. And His ancient apostles faced pain and suffering worthy of the horror genre and yet did not deny the divinity of their master. If faith were solely dependent on things only going well for the faithful, then Christianity would have quickly ended when the Romans were sending Christians to the lions for their beliefs. But the possibility of death by beasts didn’t kill their conviction because not all believers are fair-weather friends of Jesus. Our faith is not solely reliant on our ability to overpower our enemies or live a life free of pain.

Heretic’s ideological conclusion seems to come down pretty hard on the side of the charming British atheist who is incidentally also a psycho killer. But the seeming inevitability of that outcome doesn’t have to stay an inevitability forever. 

We all have to face “the problem of pain,” but some do it and yet believe. It’s time we saw it on film.

The post The Strange Faith Crisis at the Heart of ‘Heretic’ appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Would finding that out—that your partner has needed ongoing assistance to be able to “stay with you”—be gratifying to you? Would you come away from the discovery feeling reassured and excited?

Of course, you wouldn’t. Because ‘til that point, you probably assumed your spouse had actually wanted to stay with you—and maybe even enjoyed it—independent from any active assistance.

But now you know the truth: that companion of so many years has not only been relying upon extra support but also requiring it … just to be able to endure life-with-you. 

Well, shoot! How did you miss that? And when exactly did your relationship start to hurt so badly?  

If this imagined marital relationship had been all you had ever hoped and imagined it to be, it’s fair to say there would have been no need for additional outside intervention to nurse along your spouse’s desire to stay. Right?

This is what I think about every time I hear someone else declare on social media that they are working to “keep people in the Church” and “help them stay.” 

Hmmmm, okay. That’s good … I guess? I can see why anyone could be encouraged by that. On the face, it seems clearly positive—at least compared with dishearteningly obvious efforts to undermine faith or simply watching someone’s faith fall apart.

Yet, like the marriage analogy, I still find myself wondering what’s missing in those strained relationships with the Church of Jesus Christ that require so much outside help. Because again, the idea that someone needs this or that Influencer’s singular guidance in order to save their relationship with the Body of Christ, well … it begs some bigger questions about what’s actually going on with that faith connection in the first place.

Hope, healing, and humility

There’s a lot to talk about here. I’ve written in the past about seeing faith ruptures through a lens of “attachment injury” (which takes for granted the likelihood of healing) rather than the more common language of a “faith crisis” (which implies a kind of inescapable emergency that justifies any number of ways to allay personal discomfort, including straight up “faith transition”). 

Over the last couple of months, I’ve also had a chance to report on patterns across a growing number of people healing some kind of rupture with the Church—be that over questions about sexuality, church history, or an addiction consuming their lives. In each case, these individuals experienced something new in their life from God and took small steps, moment by moment, back into sweet (not angsty) communion with fellow believers. 

Given all the many ways our precious faith can be affected by a darkening world around us, it’s clear there will always be a crucial need for this kind of fellowship and ministry among believers—what Paul called “lifting up the hands that hang down.” Since 2018, President Russell Nelson has underscored how central this kind of ministering is within the Church of Christ. 

None of what I’m raising here is to deny that. But when someone is flailing in their faith, how can any of us really be sure that we—our voice, our arguments, our “brand”—are the inspired remedy for what’s truly ailing people? 

“The things of God are of deep import, and time and experience and careful and ponderous and solemn thoughts can only find them out,” Joseph Smith wrote after five cold months in the dungeon of Liberty Jail. 

“Thy mind,” he continued, “if thou wilt lead a soul unto salvation, must stretch as high as the utmost Heavens, and search into and contemplate the lowest considerations of the darkest abyss, and expand upon the broad considerations of eternal expanse.”

A profound level of humility is a prerequisite for anyone seeking to draw (and keep) people close to Christ and the Church that bears His name. All the marketing budget, charisma, and cultural cache in the world won’t be enough without that. 

A few honest questions for faith influencers

In my view, insisting that people need some major, intensive help from external sources in order to “stay in the Church” can come across as a veiled criticism that there is something fundamentally wrong, not just in someone’s relationship-to-the-Church, but with the Church itself. 

For me, at least, this is what hangs unspoken in the air with another online insistence on how well someone is doing with “keeping people in the Church.”

As John Dehlin used to do. And many Latter-day Saint influencers are wont to say today. 

To any who might find themselves declaring the same thing—“Hey, I’m doing critical work helping people stay in the Church”—I would pose a few sincere questions, starting with:

(1) What does that actually mean—that you’re helping people “stay in the Church”?

(2) Also, why is it that people need to hear from you personally in order to be reassured about the Church of Christ? 

(3) If you are clearly helping people stay in the Church, wouldn’t that be obvious? Would there really be any reason for onlookers to wonder and be concerned if the positive fruits of your work were that evident? 

(4) If, in fact, continuing concerns exist about the content you’re creating, should any of that give you momentary pause and make you wonder what you are actually accomplishing? 

One reason many influencers insist they’re doing so much great good—even in the face of sincere questions and concerns from other members—is because they are deluged by hearts, rainbows, and emotive thank-you notes from their many “followers” online. 

This phenomenon of being mentally and emotionally captivated by one’s audience is so pervasive it even has an official name: “audience capture.”  

“It can become all too easy for creatives of all kinds to become ensnared in a feedback loop with their audiences,” writes Dr. Matt Johnson—hinting at a kind of blindness that can set in when content creators take validation from their True Fans as the most reliable marker of truth, while dismissing honest questions and concerns raised by others as less valid. 

All of which leads to three more questions: 

(5) What if those raising concerns are actually right about your work, at least in part? If so, what could be gained from taking these questions more seriously? 

(6) How focused are you on the long-term impact of your work, compared with short-term expressions from people reading, listening to, or watching your content? Given the history of people who once claimed to do great good for people ultimately undermining faith in the long term, how can you be sure you’re not doing the same?

(7) In your work trying to support people who may be grappling with their faith in the Church and prophets, how much are you helping them return to that faith, compared with inadvertently providing an alternative to the covenant path? 

If you are, in any way, creating an alternative way of thinking and living—one that is distinct from the path prophets are encouraging—please, please think again and resist audience appreciation as a marker of truth. 

Even if—get this—people are thanking you effusively for “helping you stay.” Like your spouse barely-convinced to stay a few more weeks, this may or may not be a great sign. 

Some historical caution

My friend Dan Ellsworth has been writing and speaking about some of the overlooked blind spots in what’s been called the “seeker-sensitive church”—a protestant movement in the 1970s that provided coffee and doughnuts, pyrotechnics, and hipster Christian rock services in hopes of keeping young people involved in the faith. Good intentions notwithstanding, the effort famously failed to promote deeper religious conversion among its audience. To understand why, Dan cites the following fascinating observation from one pastor’s deeper dive on the topic: 

I honestly don’t recall a single true success story from the entire 5 years that I spent inside the seeker church movement. I don’t remember encountering anyone who had been previously unchurched, who came to one of our accessible and relevant Sunday services, who became a true follower of Jesus Christ, who transitioned into a supportive Small Group, and who then became a multiplying and ministering disciple. I do, however, remember meeting lots of previously churched people who had left their more traditional church fellowships because we had better music, lower expectations, and shorter services. In my experience, the seeker movement was less of a front door and more of a backdoor. It was a soft landing for nominal Christians on their way out of the evangelical church.

The uncomfortable possibility being raised here is whether the “helping people stay in the Church” project could—at times, almost always unintentionally—be a way of obscuring something unfortunate, even tragic, taking place. 

Even with all the best intentions, could pleasant-sounding rhetoric around “keeping people in the Church” sometimes distract from an inadvertent validation taking place for faith relationships that have become cynical, jaded, and more or less empty and hollow … perhaps simply running on fumes (and needing a great deal more than mere validation)?

A deeper diagnosis

In the modern vernacular, these kinds of challenging faith experiences are most often characterized using therapeutic language like “your needs aren’t being met.” But scriptural vernacular points to a deeper solution in the way it portrays these same important personal struggles.  

Instead of drawing so much attention to a presumed failure of the Church itself to fulfill needs and passions, a more ancient framing would inquire a bit more into the other side of the equation. The prophet-poet Isaiah channeled the Lord’s concerns about a people who “draw nigh unto me with their mouth and lips, but their heart is far from me.” 

Why? Because these believers had embraced popular “precepts” or “commandments of men” as “doctrine”—teaching people they were one and the same. 

This was the same verse Moroni referenced and elaborated on for the young Joseph Smith, cautioning him against organizations’ tendency to have “a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof.” 

Is your favorite Latter-day Saint influencer hesitant to say anything definitive about porn or extra-marital sex? Are they squeamish about the clear prophetic emphasis on marriage and family? Are references to covenants, ordinances, and temples secondary in their content, more of an aside or afterthought? 

Then, pay attention. 

Drawn away from repentance

Maybe you’re starting to see the real danger I’m highlighting here—that in repeating to ourselves, “My, how wonderful that we’re helping people stay in the Church,” we may be inadvertently distracting from something else taking place.

All of which leave people soothed, assured, and validated … in the very moment they are starving inside spiritually. And primarily needing one thing and one thing alone: a whole lot more of the light, truth, and love of the Savior Himself. 

Jesus Christ is the One anointed and authorized to succor us all in salvatory ways. And who stands ready to lead us to the learning (revelation) and adjustments of heart and life (repentance) that are prerequisites for real healing to come. 

“And I say unto you again that he cannot save them in their sins,” Amulek said, pushing back on a major influencer of his day. “For I cannot deny his word, and he hath said that no unclean thing can inherit the kingdom of heaven.”

He’s enough

As long as we’re open to all the Great Physician prescribes, He is enough. He really is. 

And there really is a “special kind of rest” and a “special kind of love” available in fully embracing our covenants with Him—something President Nelson has been all but pleading for us on his hands and knees to seek after. 

These are blessings available to everyone—no matter how you look, no matter how you feel inside, and no matter how many loud voices insist otherwise. 

 “Behold, doth he cry unto any, saying: Depart from me? Behold, I say unto you, Nay,” Nephi taught. “But he saith: “Come unto me all ye ends of the earth, buy milk and honey, without money and without price.”

 No better podcast or fireside has ever been given to Americans grappling over whether they belong anymore in the true faith of Christ than the questions this mighty prophet asked: 

• “Hath [God] commanded any that they should not partake of his salvation? Behold I say unto you, Nay; but he hath given it free for all men; and he hath commanded his people that they should persuade all men to repentance.”
• “Behold, hath the Lord commanded any that they should not partake of his goodness? Behold I say unto you, Nay; but all men are privileged the one like unto the other, and none are forbidden.”
• “He inviteth them all to come unto him and partake of his goodness; and he denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female; and he remembereth the heathen; and all are alike unto God, both Jew and Gentile.”

Has he been clear enough yet? Nephi just can’t stop talking about this! “Wherefore, he commandeth none that they shall not partake of his salvation.”

Bottom line: The feast is open to everyone. And if you don’t understand that—really know it for yourself—then keep seeking until you do. In the meanwhile, be careful not to allow your own personal dissatisfaction to become multiplied many times over in the lives you’re trying to reach.  

Led into the ditch

You see, many a dissatisfied person—across many charged and contested issues—has decided the solution to their own personal angst is to launch a podcast or Instagram page to “be the change they wish to see” and work towards “systemic” shifts they are convinced need to happen in order to be more comfortable as a member themselves.

“Disregard them … ignore them … Let them alone,” Jesus would surely warn us again today—calling these well-intentioned people “blind guides” (“blind leaders of the blind”) and stating clearly, “And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch” or “pit.” 

Whatever it takes

Whatever it takes, no matter how long it takes, we all need to find a living, embodied, special, covenantal relationship with the living, embodied Rescuer of men and women everywhere. There is an urgency to doing so (including for those “not feeling it” in the fellowship of His faith for various reasons—including potentially due to past trauma in their families). 

As Dan Ellsworth has been saying for years now, “Our goal should not simply be to keep people in the Church. It should be to help them find conversion.”

Yes, let’s keep doing all we can to minister, soothe, and fellowship. But in doing so, let’s do something more than merely helping struggling friends, neighbors, and family stay in an otherwise difficult relationship. 

Let’s do what we can to help those around us come to love and relish that relationship—to the point that it would be inconceivable for them to ever want to leave.

And to the point where they’d never really need any extra supplement to stay around for a very long time. 

If we do not—and if we instead present another kind of path, similar but distinct from the one outlined plainly by the Lord and His prophets—then let’s be upfront with people about what we’re offering: an alternative spiritual path.

The biggest question

To some, all this might seem a subtle, even subjective distinction I’m making here—but it’s not really small at all: Are you bringing people into a deepening covenantal relationship with God and His people? Or are you doing something else—perhaps bringing them into a deeper relationship with you? 

Could you inadvertently be presenting yourself as “the place” or “the community” where people can find their spiritual needs met … finally! (“So nice to find somewhere that gets it.”)

A place to go if “you’re not finding the connection, support, and answers” that you might have with your plain, ole’ membership—that is, in your covenantal relationship with the body of Christ. 

My friends Ty and Jeff, who set up North Star (a gathering of covenant-loving brothers and sisters who experience same-sex attraction), were extremely careful about this—so as to avoid becoming an alternative to church fellowship. 

My friends Bill and Zach, Patrick, and Terryl at Faith Matters share the same genuine desire. As Bill told me, “We don’t want to become a movement!” 

I believe him. And I know that their team is also working hard to build faith. Yet there’s always a risk of drifting from that wonderful aspiration for any of us trying to influence people online (myself included). And it’s this caution and care—especially when accompanied by the Spirit of discernment—that can help any organization and effort trying to build the Kingdom actually do that. 

Instead of building something else. Another option if the Church of Jesus Christ “just isn’t working for you,” let’s not be a soft landing place for people leaving their “first love.”

And let’s not forget that the rebirth Jesus invites us to experience is open to every one of us—if we keep waiting and watching. Praying and trusting. Loving and yielding. 

That’s my own witness. Let’s do our best to help our dear brothers and sisters regain their own rich communion and sweet fellowship among us—to happily stay and “go no more out.”

The post What Does it Mean to “Help People Stay in the Church?” appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

In 2021, a Redditor wrote, “The CES Letter inspired me to change my entire life for the better.” 

Jeremy Runnells, the letter’s author, was an online marketer. He grew up as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and said that in his youth he read only faithful Church sources. Yet as an adult he came across things that led him to a number of questions about the scriptures and leaders of his church. By his telling, however, when he sought to get these genuine concerns answered, he was only met with silence.

After Runnells shared this tale with the world, he became a popular figure on church-antagonistic podcasts and an online celebrity. His journey took off so far that his work even appeared in Spider-Man comic art. 

Most of the people who were attracted to Runnells responded to this story, and only after to the specific questions. As YouTube commenter Miss Syrinxie explained to her audience, Runnells didn’t intend to write an exposé of the Church. He “had legitimate questions that he was seeking answers to. Why couldn’t anyone just honestly answer his questions? Obviously, it’s because no one has the answers.”

There was only one problem. That story isn’t true. Runnells made almost the entire thing up. 

This is confirmed by a new analysis that Michael Peterson and Jacob Hess published last week: “Were these ever the sincere questions of an earnest truth seeker?” The investigation outlines ten different lines of evidence demonstrating the true origin of the letter.

When the CES letter was first published in April 2013, Runnells wrote that it was a list of sincere religious questions that originated from reading Church-approved sources, and which he sent to a director of a Latter-day Saint institute in the hope of finding answers to his questions to restore his faith. Yet, as demonstrated in this review of the available evidence, Runnells wasn’t sincere in posing these questions at all. This was a pretense intended to manipulate his audience into giving him more credence than he deserved. 

In fact, in July of 2012—many months prior to the letter being published—Runnells created a new Reddit account with the username u/kolobot that openly attacked the faith. The engagement of this user over the nine months before the first publication of the CES Letter tells a very different story about the origin of the letter.

By October 2012, Runnells was attempting through this anonymous profile to generate viral content with a letter to to a senior church leader. This letter, published on October 10, 2012, was titled “An Open Letter to Quentin L. Cook.” However, it was not widely read. In it, however, he runs down many of the matters he addresses in his future CES Letter. But in this letter, he stated the issues as assertions rather than questions. 

He also stated in this letter that by this point, he considered himself an “apostate soul” and that this came about because of what he had “found on the evil internet.”According to his own account, Runnells’ disaffection from his faith began back in February 2012, when he began to read the Church-hostile apologetics of Grant Palmer, Jerald and Sandra Tanner, and material on the website MormonThink—all influential critics of Latter-day Saint beliefs. 

It was primarily these sources that seeded his concerns. He even lifted language directly from Palmer’s book “Insiders Guide to Mormon Origins.”  In November of 2012, Runnells’s anonymous u/kolobot username admitted that he had “left the church a few months ago.”

Runnells also added a “flair” to his Reddit username that read, “I’m on a tapir.” The tapir is a deeply embedded meme in anti-Latter-day Saint circles. His use of the tapir meme meant that by this time, he was familiar with questions about the authenticity of The Book of Mormon and had rejected the answers already provided by the Church and many faithful scholars to those questions. 

After being out of the Church for at least six months, Runnells reached out to the r/exmormon community, asking for rebuttals to an argument that The Book of Abraham, a volume of Latter-day Saint scripture, was historical.

In January 2013, Runnells began advocating for people to leave his former faith on Reddit.

By March of 2013, Jeremy Runnells was not asking sincere questions he wanted an answer to—if he ever was. He had made a determination about his beliefs, had declared he had left, and was looking for help in undermining arguments that addressed his concerns so he could persuade others to leave.

Runnells’ path is certainly his own. Many people leave the faith traditions they grew up in, a trend that was prominent during Runnells’ departure from the faith but that has begun to decline. But as a professional marketer, and after his October letter didn’t gain traction, he likely knew that the familiar beats of his actual story didn’t have the pizzazz to go viral and encourage others to leave the Church as he wanted.

In March, his grandfather, a Latter-day Saint, had grown concerned about the status of Runnells’ faith. By this point, Runnells had already publicly disavowed his faith, but only under the online pseudonym.

His grandfather had a friend of his reach out to Runnells, a man who happened to be a Church institute director. He emailed him to ask about his disaffection. This circumstance provided Runnells with his opportunity. He could leverage the situation by using his communication with the CES director to give his essay a cloak of credibility, while creating a uniquely sympathetic narrative about his disaffiliation distinct from the actual timeline. 

So Runnells, still under his pseudonym, reached out again to the r/exmormon community with a first draft, asking them for feedback and advice about the letter. When confronted about this public discrepancy later, Runnells claimed that he was only looking for “grammar” and “fact” correction. The record of these conversations, however, suggests more substantive suggestions that he integrated into his work. 

Before the letter was released, it was already recognized in this online community of dissidents as a ruse. One Church-antagonistic Redditor responded, “This is a mini-thesis,” but added, “I love how this reads as a legit letter.” Runnells thanked the commenter.

The letter he wrote had a biting, dismissive tone, and he knew before publication that he was engaging in “machine-gunning,” a rhetorical technique of overwhelming the listener with accusations.

In writing the letter, Runnells knew the CES director would read it, but just days after release, he admitted to friendly sources that he “didn’t write this for the CES guy.” Later that year, again to a friendly audience, he admitted the letter was written for TBMs—an acronym meaning either True Believing Mormons or Totally Brainwashed Mormons. And in 2015, after formally withdrawing his membership to avoid excommunication, he said, “The target audience is the fence-sitters.”

After finishing the letter, he published it first on Reddit with instructions “to give to your TBM loved ones” before even sending it to the CES director. 

Whatever you believe about the substance of Runnells’ accusations, the history of the letter is clear—this was not a sincere search for answers but a savvy, calculated effort to undermine faith. 

Simply put, the popular narrative that Runnells has promoted, both in the letter and on the website devoted to distributing it, that the letter to the CES director was written by someone who still identified as a church member, had discovered these questions largely through sources Latter-day Saints accept, and was only shared publicly after he failed to receive answers to his questions is a fabrication.

Only days after sending the letter, Runnells personally coordinated with Tom Phillips to publish the letter on Phillips’ Church-antagonistic website, MormonThink.

In the days after the publication of his letter, many Latter-day Saints taken in by his narrative began to answer his questions since his story appeared to be sincere. In writing answers to the questions, Michael Ash wrote, “I don’t doubt that the author of the CES Letter is sincere … with sincere hopes of helping other people get out of the same situation.”

Similarly, Jonathan Cannon wrote that the essay came from Runnells’ “real, lived experience.” And Jim Bennett said, “I think Jeremy Runnells is an honorable, good guy … And I think [he] came to his position from a place of integrity.”

Each of these respondents gave Runnells the benefit of the doubt that the story around the letter was true. He misled them—as he did so many others. 

Despite Runnells claiming he was looking for answers, and despite the fact that those providing them were giving him the benefit of the doubt, doing so in good faith, Runnells responded with personal attacks and threats, in one case deriding their “pompous arrogance” and threatening to kick their “a**.” 

In the years since, Runnells has continued to promote his letter. While today it is still titled and formatted as a letter, 43% of the material in it today was never sent to the CES director to see or respond to. He continues to display high-quality designs and a logo and has even translated the letter into several other languages after claiming that he never intended to disseminate it.  

Much time and attention have been given to addressing the questions that Runnells poses. But something else was never addressed, because it wasn’t even in people’s awareness. As this investigation confirmed, the foundational story of the letter itself, the story that has so effectively convinced readers to give serious attention to what this man insisted were his sincere “questions,” was simply never true. 

In an August 9, 2024, presentation examining the new evidence, acclaimed historian Steven C. Harper concluded, “The author was not an honest truth seeker. As many many people have done, I took for granted that he was who he said he was. … I was one of many, who knows how many thousands, who read the CES letter and wanted to wrap my arms around Jeremy Runnels and say, ‘man that sucks, I wish that stupid CES guy had been better to you.’ And that’s just not what happened. That’s not the truth.”

Michael Peterson and Jacob Hess’s in-depth investigation into the history of the CES Letter is available linking here to the substack Publishing Peace. An updated version was released August 13.

Editor’s Note: The article has been updated to reflect an update to reference the publication date of the latest version of the article. 

The post The True Origins of the CES Letter appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

To answer these questions in the story of Chad Daybell, we first need to understand that Chad Daybell was not alone in his journey into madness. By now, many church members are familiar with the picture of law enforcement encountering Chad Daybell and his then-new wife Lori Vallow by the side of a pool in Hawaii, where Daybell and Vallow had been reading from the book Visions of Glory, a book created by the late John Pontius in conversations with Thom Harrison.

The genre of Visions of Glory is apocalyptic, similar to the biblical Book of Revelation and other similar passages in scripture. Visions of Glory purports to be an account of a series of Thom Harrison’s near-death experiences, with elaborate apocalyptic visions of the future of the world and the Church. In a letter to his priesthood leaders following the book’s publication, Thom Harrison walked back much of the contents of the book and expressed regret for its publication, though his statements in other settings seem to convey none of that regret.

When Daybell met Lori Vallow in October 2018, it was a meeting of two delusion-prone individuals with deep emotional and psychological cravings, surrounded by enabling friends whose apostate ideas helped accelerate the couple’s downward spiral into evil. And observing this, believing and sustaining mainstream Latter-day Saints are once again left with questions that are ominous, unsettling, and personal in nature: could a downward spiral like this happen to anyone? Could it happen to the people around me in church? Could it possibly even happen to me?

A large part of the challenge in thinking through the Daybell and Vallow cases has to do with the fact that they claimed as a basis for their apostasies and criminality some phenomena that are real elements of our faith. We do believe in prophecy, including apocalyptic prophecy about the future. We do believe in spiritual discernment, and as I wrote recently, we certainly do believe in the demonic. We also believe in revelation that sometimes comes in out-of-body experiences while near death, among other situations.

How, then, are all of these realities hijacked and counterfeited by people who are consumed with delusion and evil?

In our cravings for simplistic and trite answers, we might point to mental illness, or to simple character flaws, or to religious indoctrination. But there are many people for whom some or all of those factors apply who never end up embracing the delusional evil that drove Daybell and Vallow.

On the question of mental illness, mainstream psychology might address the behavior of Daybell and Vallow with references to family systems, cognitive behavior, psychosis, and other clinical concepts. All of these are valuable and can shed light on different dimensions of this awful story. But beyond mainstream psychology, Jungian analysis offers an interesting way of thinking that resonates with our restoration doctrines in important ways.

The great psychologist Carl Jung was a close associate of Sigmund Freud for a time, and they shared an understanding that our lives are influenced to a great degree by our subconscious. The subconscious is a dimension of the heart and mind containing our life experiences and observations of the world since birth, along with our responses to those experiences and observations. A great amount of effort in psychotherapy is oriented toward helping clients to identify motives and drives that come from the subconscious and helping them to reprocess in healthier ways the experiences and observations that reside there below our awareness.

Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud underwent a professional split, and a major reason for their split was Jung’s belief in another layer of the psyche deeper than the subconscious, which he called the “collective unconscious.” Jung’s belief in the collective unconscious arose from his study of dreams, visionary stories, and mythologies throughout the world. In these, Jung found distinctive common elements, even in cultures that were isolated from the influence of the world’s great religions and mythological literature. Jung inferred that in the psyche of every human being, there is a vault of “archetypes,” stories and figures, and even archetypal patterns of lived experience that reflect how the world works.

Archetypes are perceived in concepts like hero, mother, warrior, trickster, rebel, magician, lover, wounded healer, and more. They are the basis for humanity’s stories, and we encounter the archetypes in our experiences of life.

The notion of the collective unconscious should resonate with Latter-day Saints, as we read in restoration scripture: “For I, the Lord God, created all things, of which I have spoken, spiritually, before they were naturally upon the face of the earth (Moses 3:5).” Or in Jung’s words, “The form of the world into which [a person] is born is already inborn in him, as a virtual image.” For Latter-day Saints, the restoration allows us to understand the “forms” of our world, what Jung called archetypes in our collective unconscious, as memories from this world’s spiritual creation and our lived experiences of premortality.

Jung viewed apocalyptic experiences as “archetypal,” shared across religions and cultures and continents. In modern psychology, experiences of visions, including apocalyptic visions of the end times, are classified as psychosis, a form of mental breakdown. But Jung held that these experiences are more accurately described as an eruption of archetypal concepts coming up from the collective unconscious. But on its way into our conscious mind, an archetypal concept like apocalyptic vision passes like a game of telephone through our subconscious, where it is shaped by our culture along with our life experience and other reference points. We see this evidenced in the different personal stylistic and other “flavors” that characterize apocalyptic visions from prophetic figures in scripture.

In the Jungian view, an experience of apocalyptic psychosis can serve a positive purpose, creating a process of psychological renewal. He held that view due to the fact that many people throughout the world who have these experiences do return to full mental wellness, often better than they were before the experience. In a Latter-day Saint view, this makes sense: in our engagement with apocalyptic material like the Book of Revelation, we find ourselves situated in the great story of good and evil in the world, the grand contours of humanity’s spiritual history. In the context of this great story, adversity and suffering have meaning. And we know that evil will be overcome in the end, followed by renewal. This is a vastly more healthy psychological perspective compared to nihilism, where people see themselves as soulless, life as meaningless, and world events as a thrashing around of random evolutionary forces.

But there is an element in the development of apocalyptic stories that speaks directly to questions of discernment. As documented in Christopher Blythe’s book Terrible Revolution, apocalypticism tends to both attract and fuel extremism, and we would do well to understand why. One of our greatest frameworks for discernment is the three temptations of Christ, where we see the three root causes of evil in the world: a perception that our physical appetites and cravings need fulfillment; that we need recognition and validation; and that our problems could be solved if we had more power and control. The three temptations are a satanic misinterpretation of real human needs, and their influence extends to life in general, including experiences of religion and revelation. To use an analogy, a drug addict comes to view every human encounter and every life event through the lens of their addiction and tends to think of everything in terms of how it can lead them to their next high. In the same way, a person with unhealed cravings around physical appetites, recognition/validation, or power/control will interpret even their religion in ways that reflect those bottomless pits in the soul.

The pathological element only reveals itself in the way the individual reacts to them and how he interprets them. The characteristic feature of a pathological reaction is, above all, identification with the archetype. This produces a sort of inflation and possession by the emergent contents, so that they pour out in a torrent which no therapy can stop. Identification can, in favourable cases, sometimes pass off as a more or less harmless inflation. But in all cases, identification with the unconscious brings a weakening of consciousness, and herein lies the danger. You do not “make” an identification, you do not “identify yourself,” but you experience your identity with the archetype in an unconscious way and so are possessed by it.

This insight provides a tremendously useful way to understand the emergence of false prophets. The way we conceptualize the term “prophet” can be greatly warped by culture and other subconscious factors to a degree that we no longer have a healthy or realistic relationship with that archetype. The Christ spoke of John the Baptist and said, “What went ye out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken with the wind? But what went ye out for to see? A man clothed in soft raiment? behold, they that wear soft clothing are in kings’ houses.” Joseph Smith is reported to have gone in plain clothes to meet a group of new converts and asked one of them, “I suppose you are looking for an old man with a long, gray beard. What would you think if I told you I was Joseph Smith?”

In both of these instances, the questions being asked are interrogating the hearers’ experience of the archetype of prophet. Do they have an erroneous mental model of the prophet archetype based on their culture or other influences? In the prepper communities where people like Chad Daybell and Lori Vallow met, the archetype of prophet seems to have been greatly warped by Visions of Glory and other similar works that seem to conflate the archetypes of prophet and magician. Several individuals have gone so far as to personally identify with this warped prophet archetype, producing streams of fabulist false prophecy.

Still others have tried to identify with the archetype of Aaron, the prophetic interpreter for Moses. They see passages like Jeremiah 23 and Ezekiel 34 that condemn ancient Israelite religious leaders, and in a perversion of Aaron’s role, they erroneously interpret those passages as applying to the current leadership of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They combine those with servant passages in the book of Isaiah to create a narrative that the president of the Church is not a prophet but merely a “key-holder,” waiting for a future “Davidic servant” who will vanquish the Church’s enemies. “Davidic servant” narratives combine the archetypes of prophet, magician, hero, and warrior, and it is not surprising that a number of commentators in the Church have sought self-importance by appropriating that surrealist Frankenstein of an archetype.

We can conclude by asking a difficult question, one with a hopeful and joyful answer.

The question is whether a delusional fabulist false prophet might emerge in the governing councils of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This question is easy to answer, and the reality is that this kind of risk in the Church is practically nil. To understand why, we need to go back into church history.

In the kind of honesty that brings a smile to the faces of Jungians everywhere, Brigham Young frankly acknowledged that he saw no need to be like Joseph Smith. And this might sound shocking to believing Latter-day Saints who might wonder if Brigham Young was denying the prophetic mantle in the Church.

The answer? Not at all.

Brigham Young knew he didn’t need to appropriate whatever archetypal vision of prophethood that might have formed around Joseph Smith. Brigham could exercise the prophetic mantle with his personal gifts, which were different from Joseph’s gifts, which were different from the gifts of John the Baptist, whose prophetic gifts differed from those of Isaiah, whose gifts differed from those of Moses, and on and on.

The emergence of our current system of prophetic succession has been a godsend. In it, we find a steady and reliable guard against the kinds of perverse incentives that have placed sensationalist false prophets and false teachers at the head of so many Christian communities in the present day. The men in line for prophetic succession in the Church spend many years deliberating in the council system, where President James E. Faust described, “this requirement of unanimity provides a check on bias and personal idiosyncrasies.”

All of our current members of the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve are part of a generation of church leadership that either witnessed or directly participated in church governance during the ministry of President Spencer W. Kimball. In his book Charity Never Faileth, Vaughn J. Featherstone recalled an experience with then-Elder Kimball of the Quorum of the Twelve:

Some time ago, I had the privilege of attending a stake conference in the company of President Spencer W. Kimball, before he became president of the church. Elder Kimball worked tirelessly, holding one meeting after another until late Saturday night. On Sunday, we held a meeting with bishoprics and high councilors at eight a.m. This was followed by the general session, a meeting with the seventies quorum, an interview with the patriarch, and the dedication of a chapel, with a talk to seminary students in the evening. We went to the stake president’s home about nine o’clock to wait for our plane, which did not leave until nearly eleven. The stake president’s wife wanted to fix us dinner, but Elder Kimball said,

“Please, all I need is a bowl of milk and some of your homemade bread to break up in it.”

The biography Lengthen Your Stride is full of similar stories of President Kimball, like this one involving Elder Neal A. Maxwell: 

As they both sat on the stand in their home ward sacrament meeting, Spencer took Neal Maxwell by the hand and whispered, “Do you know that I love you with all my heart?” The next week, Spencer renewed the sentiment: “Do you remember what I said to you last week?”

Elder Maxwell would later recall of Elder Howard W. Hunter in a talk at BYU,

The Acting President of the Council of the Twelve, President Howard W. Hunter, is a meek man. He once refused a job he needed as a young man because it would have meant another individual would have lost his job. This is the same lowly man, when I awakened after a weary and dusty day together with him on assignment in Egypt, who was quietly shining my shoes, a task he had hoped to complete unseen.

Elder Ezra Taft Benson was notoriously politically active, offering frequent and intense denunciations of communism. When he became president of the Church, many church members dreaded the possibility that the Church would be steered in an overtly political direction. Other members of the Church celebrated this possibility, anticipating that the Church would become the force they envisioned for defeating communism in the world. But in his opening press conference as president of the Church, President Benson offered a statement that shattered any warrior-prophet archetypes that people had fashioned for him:

My heart has been filled with an overwhelming love and compassion for all members of the Church and our Heavenly Father’s children everywhere. I love all our Father’s children of every color, creed, and political persuasion. My only desire is to serve as the Lord would have me do.

In the October 2014 general conference, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland spoke of an instance where he was impacted by Elder Thomas S. Monson:

In that regard, I pay a personal tribute to President Thomas Spencer Monson. I have been blessed by an association with this man for 47 years now, and the image of him I will cherish until I die is of him flying home from then–economically devastated East Germany in his house slippers because he had given away not only his second suit and his extra shirts but the very shoes from off his feet. “How beautiful upon the mountains [and shuffling through an airline terminal] are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace.” More than any man I know, President Monson has “done all he could” for the widow and the fatherless, the poor and the oppressed.

Finally, in every general conference, church members are deeply impacted by witnessing the personal affection that the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve have for each other:

This is a culture that has prevailed among the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles for many years. Any church leader who passes through that quorum into the presidency of the Church will have been profoundly shaped by decades of these kinds of daily interactions that short-circuit personal tendencies toward selfishness and egomania. The prophetic mantle in the Church of Jesus Christ cannot be stolen or appropriated by dominant personalities or by leaders of apostate factions.

In the time of Isaiah, people wanted a spectacular dominant archetypal figure more than they wanted, in Isaiah’s language, “the waters of Shiloah that go softly.” The steady, calm, and reliable influence of God was not answering their cravings for power and for the sensational. So Isaiah informed the people that they would be given what they desired: 

…even the king of Assyria, and all his glory: and he shall come up over all his channels, and go over all his banks:

And he shall pass through Judah; he shall overflow and go over, he shall reach even to the neck; and the stretching out of his wings shall fill the breadth of thy land, O Immanuel.

The king of Assyria inflicted horror upon Judah, and the message from Isaiah seems to be that if we are dominated by a desire for archetypal figures instead of real, steady, saving prophetic influence, God will give us the thing that we desire.

By contrast, amid the sadness and horror of the Daybell trial, the good news is that we can have every confidence that the leadership structure of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will only ever produce authentic prophets and not warped archetypes of the real thing.

The post The Seductive Power of Apocalyptic Ideas in Mainstream Religions appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Many members of the Church, particularly among our young people, have experienced what they perceive as a black swan event in their spiritual lives. In testing the hypothesis that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the restored Church of Christ, some of our brothers and sisters have stumbled across an observation that they view as a black swan that has undermined or even destroyed their faith. The gift of faith is not received through scientific investigation, but as rational beings, we seek to construct a solid intellectual foundation for our beliefs, so these faith-destroying black swans can be impactful.

The Black Swan Triangle

The nature of these black swans is complex, but in general, they fall into one of three categories relating to science, history, and social issues. Collectively, we can consider these three the black swan triangle of testimony trials.

The black swans of church history typically center on events in the early days of the Restoration when the actions, words, or historical accounts of certain church leaders seem strangely incongruent with the high aspirations of the gospel of Christ and also with current cultural standards. As these sometimes embarrassing bits of Church history became more broadly known in the information age, some members have found them troubling. The general question emanating from these historical black swans asked by doubting members is straightforward: “Has the Church tacitly deceived us concerning these controversial church history reports?”

The final category of black swans connected to social issues is perhaps the type that is of more contemporary interest in church culture, particularly to our young people. These black swans relate to issues of race, women’s rights, sexual orientation, and gender, among others. These matters have taken on special significance in recent decades, in part because of our postmodern society’s focus on the primacy of the self. The question stemming from doubting members regarding these “social issue” black swans is thought-provoking given our Christian ambition to love our neighbors as ourselves: “Is the Church intolerant and old fashioned?”

That some of our skeptical members put forward these questions in response to the perceived black swans they encounter is to be expected. They are fair questions to ask. And our brothers and sisters in the gospel deserve answers to the extent we can offer them.

Understanding the Black Swan Wounds

While there may be some disaffected members who use the black swans as an excuse to avoid the lifestyle constraints of commandments, there are many in faith crisis who are earnest seekers who have indeed encountered what they interpreted as a black swan that seriously undermined their faith. So, how can we help our beloved friends and family members who have been wounded by a “black swan” that has damaged their faith?

These two functions correspond to the vertical and horizontal dimensions of The Church of Jesus of Christ of Latter-day Saints, sometimes referred to by scholars of the Restoration. The vertical dimension comprises the doctrines and ordinances that tie us to God (e.g., the scriptures, priesthood authority, and ceremonial practices like the sacrament and the endowment). The horizontal dimension encompasses the communal practices within an LDS congregation that link us to each other (e.g., congregational worship, ministering to neighbors, Young Men’s and Women’s programs, Primary, social gatherings, and so on).

When one of our members stumbles over what they regard as a black swan that damages their faith to the point of leaving the Church, they often confront an existential crisis. This is to be expected. The vertical and horizontal dimensions of their worldview have collapsed. They have lost their orientation to the universe and the supportive community on which they have theretofore relied. This spiritual upheaval leaves some of our disaffected members in a state of uncertainty and sometimes engenders resentment and anger against the Church. We must be understanding of the dilemma faced by our members whose faith has been upended by a black swan. They need our love and empathy at a difficult time, not our condemnation.

The Consequences of Loss of Faith

We can also help our wounded members by sketching out the consequences of our individual decision-making regarding faith. The stakes are high. It is useful to consider the potential aftereffects of loss of faith in God. When we compare a life of scientific materialism (or secular humanism) versus a life of faith, several fundamental differences emerge. [Adapted in part from Huston Smith, Why Religion Matters, HarperOne, 2001.]  

First, for scientific materialists, matter is all there is. For believers, in contrast, spirit takes precedence over material things. Spirit is part of reality. The restored gospel reveals that “… the spirit and the body are the soul of man” (D&C 88:15). Life is more than just physical well-being, more than just food in the belly. This is why Christ urged us to remember that “man does not live by bread alone” (Matthew 4:4). A life of faith is a life of spiritual striving, wherein we endeavor to commune with God each day.  

Second, for the scientific materialist, man is the most sophisticated, highly evolved creature there is. Man is king. For the believer, in contrast, more created less;  God is the greatest of all, and man is called to become more like Him. After Moses’ encounter with Jehovah, he concluded, “Now for this cause, I know that man is nothing, which thing I never had supposed” (Moses 1:10). The charge from our creator is to recognize our subordinate position and then humbly work to emulate Him.  

Thirdly, for the scientific materialist, life has no ultimate purpose. The sobering utterance of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg calls this gloomy worldview into stark relief.  “The more the universe seems comprehensible,” he wrote, “the more it also seems pointless” (Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes, Basic Books, 1977).  For the scientific materialist, life and the universe arose from random processes and are together a big cosmic joke of sorts. For the believer, in contrast, mortal life was ordained of God and has a specified purpose. “For behold, this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man” (Moses 1:39). With an understanding of life’s purpose,  the believer can find meaning in daily life, can have hope in a joyful outcome for the world, and can feel at home in the universe because it was made for us.

Becoming One’s Own God

In an age of moral relativism and a postmodern focus on the self, our society often teaches our young people that “authenticity” to oneself is one of life’s paramount virtues.  In our popular culture, we often hear the aphorism, “You do you, and I’ll do me.”  That the “selfie,” a photo wherein the individual is both the photographer and the photographed, has emerged as a ubiquitous practice in our society calls attention to the narcissism of the age.  From a Christian perspective, the obvious shortcoming of making authenticity a top priority is that the gospel calls us to set aside our own desires and to be something more than we would otherwise be.

If we are honest, we must acknowledge that our “authentic” person is sometimes too close an approximation of the natural man or woman, who is “an enemy to God” and His goodness (Mosiah 3:19). This is why King Benjamin in the Book of Mormon urged us to “… putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble …” (Mosiah 3:19). In a life of faith, we aspire to be something more than humans naturally are; we seek to rise beyond the state of nature. Our Father in Heaven asks us to aim higher, to “Come unto Christ, and be perfected in Him” (Moroni 10:32). For most of us, this would typically mean abandoning some of what is authentic in us in favor of something higher and better than ourselves.

Taken to the extreme, the greatest danger of abandoning God in favor of some kind of self-centered “authenticity” is that one is very likely to emerge as one’s own god. Referring to the popular practice of following “the god within,” New York Times columnist and author Ross Douthat has called this phenomenon the “Oprahfication” of faith in America, alluding to the perpetual parade of self-help gurus on programs like the Oprah Winfrey show that advocate the pursuit of the “god within” (Ross Douthat, Bad Religion, Simon & Schuster, 2012). 

This approach often reduces religious practice to self-affirmation and justification, conflating authenticity to the “god within” to communion with the divine. The popularity of the “god within” trend is one reason why today’s “Nones” (i.e., people with no formal religious affiliation) can often be heard to say: “I’m a spiritual person, but I don’t believe in organized religion.” In the same conversation, one might hear a reference to “my truth,” a philosophical oxymoron that can only be understood with postmodern moral relativism in mind. In this sentiment, there are echoes of a powerful, prescient passage from the first section of the Doctrine and Covenants:  “… but every man walketh in his own way, and after the image of his own god, whose image is in the likeness of the world …” (D&C 1:16). With this danger in mind, surely this is why Jesus said: “…If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me” (Luke 9:23).

A Latter-day Saint Rumspringa

It may be useful to think of departure from the Church, particularly among our young people, as something akin to the Amish practice of rumspringa. Among the Amish, the youth commonly undertake what’s called a rumspringa, wherein, as young adults, they leave their religious community and live for a time in the modern world, affording them an opportunity to consider how much they value their spiritual roots and cultural inheritance. Apparently, many young Amish return to their community after a rumspringa period of more secular exploration and experience.  

While an unofficial rumspringa experience is not ideal, such a path will nevertheless be a reality for some of our members. This time and perspective may help some to recognize that what they perceived as black swans in the certainty of youth are much more understandable in the complexity of life. And surely many of them, like the Amish, will also return to the fold after their unsanctioned rumspringa, short or long. They will be drawn back both for the blessings of the Latter-day Saint community, the horizontal dimension of the Church, and also for the comforting doctrines and soul-saving ordinances, the vertical dimension. 

Normalizing the Process of Doubt

So how can we help our doubting members wounded by a black swan of one kind or another resolve to come back, to “come, join with us” to use Elder Uchtdorf’s phrase (Elder Dieter Uchtdorf, Come Join with Us, October General Conference, 2013), and help us strive to build the kingdom of God on the earth? Perhaps what our black swan casualties need most is love and patience; they need space and time to sort out their beliefs. During their unofficial rumspringa, short or long, the Spirit of God will be calling to them.

Setting an expectation that the process of skepticism and doubt is a normal part of our individual members’ faith journeys is also essential. We need to make room for the doubting souls in our pews and congregations. We are all “doubting Thomases” from time to time.

Communion More Than Arguments

Helping our members who struggle with the black swan triangle of testimony trials requires more than just an understanding and welcoming environment and more than just cogent explanations to difficult questions. Our skeptical brothers and sisters certainly deserve intelligent responses to their questions that speak to their brains, but more importantly, they need manifestations of the Holy Spirit that touch their hearts. People looking for God are not usually looking for arguments. They would not likely be persuaded by the most eloquent explanations regarding controversial Church history accounts, complex scientific questions, or perplexing social policy.

No Need to Lose Our Nerve

In our efforts to assist the black swan casualties among us, there is no need for us to back away from our own faith commitments in some kind of appeasement to the fashionable criticisms of the day. The restored gospel has very specific truth claims: that God opened a new dispensation by calling a boy prophet; that He revealed new scripture and reestablished priesthood authority; that He restored the Church of Christ based on patterns in the primitive church, and on and on and on. We stand by these claims and make no apology for them. We also collectively engage these truths anew to understand where we have fallen short and how we can realize yet unseen possibilities for our faith. We have not lost our nerve.

Our invitation to the black swan wounded is to come back and partake of these divine gifts, the veracity of which we believe. We fully expect the Good Shepherd to keep calling to His sheep “on rumspringa” and to bring them back into His fold by and by. As the Good Shepherd’s willing ranch hands and sometimes stray sheep ourselves, we commit our best efforts to love and support all His sheep, whether in His divine pasture just now or not. We know His “… hand is stretched out still” (Isaiah 9:17) as it always will be. We worship Him in part because we can count on Him, “… the light which shineth in darkness” (D&C 11:11). May His light illuminate the path forward for all our beloved, black swan casualties, including each one of us from time to time.

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