Other Concerns
Most of the CES Letter tries to show the Church is not true: that the Book of Mormon was invented, that the First Vision never happened. This last section argues something narrower, that the Church is not honest. It gathers grievances about money, secrecy, the Church's name, and how it treats its scholars, and asks whether you can trust the institution that teaches it.
That is a fair question, and a different one. The author knows it, filing these complaints under a heading that grants they are "secondary to all of the above," and that they "do not matter if the foundational truth claims… are not true."[1] So take him at his word, and watch one move repeat in all four complaints: a real fact handed an implication it will not carry.
One move, four times
The Church really did go quiet on detailed financial statements back in 1959. True. But "audits itself and reveals nothing, so it must be hiding theft" does not follow from a policy thousands of private charities keep.
Two old edits get the same treatment. A Sunday School manual really did change Brigham Young's word "wives" to "[wife]," brackets and all.[2] A modern teaching manual really did cut the words "who has means" from an 1899 Lorenzo Snow tithing sermon, turning a conditional plea into what reads like a command.[3] A member can dislike both and still hold the faith. What neither one proves is the verdict the section is after: a uniquely dishonest church locking up its books, its history, and its members' minds.
The clearest example is the one the section dwells on. A 2012 Ensign story quotes a bishop in Argentina telling a struggling family to pay tithing even when money is short. Read alone, it sounds cruel. But one sentence on the same page never makes it into the quotation: the family "received some commodities from the bishops' storehouse during their financial difficulties."[4]
In other words, the Church was feeding this family while it taught them. Put that line back and the story means nearly the reverse of how the section uses it.
Where the criticism actually holds
Not all of this is unfair. More financial transparency genuinely would build trust, and a believer can wish these edits had gone differently and still hold the faith. The trouble is what the section does with its fair points. It wraps them in heat so intense the valid complaints sink with the weak ones, until the case sets the Church beside
"policies and practices you'd expect to find in a totalitarian system such as North Korea or George Orwell's 1984; not from the gospel of Jesus Christ."[5]
North Korea imprisons and starves the people who try to walk away from it. You can stop attending a ward this Sunday, keep your job, keep your family, and never look back. The two do not belong in the same sentence. Reaching for the comparison does not make the genuine concerns hit harder. It makes them hit softer, because once a newcomer catches one obvious exaggeration, they start mistrusting the fair points sitting next to it.
A photo of something still moving
There is a subtler distortion underneath the overreach. The CES Letter catches the Church mid-change and presents the freeze-frame as the final word. It was assembled in 2013 and revised in 2017, the years the Church moved hardest in the direction the section says it refuses to go: the twenty-seven-volume Joseph Smith Papers, the Gospel Topics Essays that took up the hardest subjects under its own name, and Saints, a history that keeps the parts a public-relations office would cut.[6] To caption that body as standing still is a choice about what the reader is allowed to see.
The move is portable
Each of the four sub-articles restores something the original took out.
Transparency and Censorship takes on the heart of the section, the accusation that the Church buried its own history, starting with the Richard Bushman line stamped across the top of the page. Bushman did say "the dominant narrative is not true; it can't be sustained," but the cover crops away the next breath, where he calls on the Church to rebuild that narrative on the full record so the faith can stand. Read whole, the line is a believing historian's counsel, not a confession.[7]
Church Finances walks through the 1959 disclosure, the Ensign Peak investment fund and its settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, City Creek, and the 2012 tithing story with its storehouse sentence put back. The Securities and Exchange Commission is the federal agency that polices investment funds, and its penalty here was a real one, granted rather than explained away.
Names of the Church catches the three-name argument misstating its own first step. The 1830 name was "Church of Christ," not "Church of Jesus Christ," so the 1834 change did not remove the words the CES Letter insists it removed.[8]
And Anti-Intellectualism sets the case that the Church silences thinkers against its four universities, the 1990s scholar disciplines in full context, and one inconvenient fact: among Latter-day Saints, more education tracks with higher church activity, the reverse of nearly every other American faith.[9]
If you take one tool away from this section, make it this: when the next charge arrives, pull the fact apart from the meaning you are handed with it, then go read the sentence sitting right next to the one you were shown. Do that here and the documented facts hold up. The sweeping conclusions piled on them are what give way.
And keep the author's own concession in view, because it is the fair one. By his measure, none of this decides whether the Church is true. These are trust questions about an institution run by imperfect people, and the honest answer is that some of them have merit: more financial openness would help, and a member can wish a few of these edits had gone the other way. What none of them reach is the verdict the section needs, a uniquely dishonest church. Hold each documented fact apart from the sweeping conclusion bolted to it, and it is the conclusions, not the facts, that keep coming loose.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Other Concerns," p. 112. The section opens under the heading framing the Church's "Dishonesty, Censorship, and Whitewashing Over Its History" and states that these concerns are secondary to the foundational truth claims. ↩︎
Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Brigham Young (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1997), ch. 23. The manual renders Brigham Young's "wives" as "[wife]" in two places, the brackets signaling an editorial change. See the Transparency and Censorship article for the full discussion. Cf. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Other Concerns," pp. 115–116. ↩︎
Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Lorenzo Snow (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2012) reproduces Snow's 1899 General Conference tithing address with an ellipsis in place of the clause "who has means." See the Church Finances article. Cf. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Other Concerns," p. 116. ↩︎
Aaron L. West, "Sacred Transformations," Ensign, December 2012. The article on the Vigil family states, on the same page as the bishop's tithing counsel, that the family "received some commodities from the bishops' storehouse during their financial difficulties," the sentence omitted from the CES Letter's quotation. Cf. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Other Concerns," p. 116. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Other Concerns," p. 125. The section's closing syllogism equates the combined concerns with "policies and practices you'd expect to find in a totalitarian system such as North Korea or George Orwell's 1984; not from the gospel of Jesus Christ." ↩︎
"The Joseph Smith Papers," Church Historian's Press, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/; "Gospel Topics Essays," The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/; Saints: The Story of the Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days, 4 vols. (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2018–2024). ↩︎
Richard L. Bushman, "Faith Again" fireside, June 12, 2016. In context: "I think for the Church to remain strong it has to reconstruct its narrative. The dominant narrative is not true; it can't be sustained. The Church has to absorb all this new information or it will be on very shaky grounds, and that's what it's trying to do." Bushman, author of Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Knopf, 2005) and a stake patriarch, remains a defender of the Restoration's truth claims. See the Transparency and Censorship article. ↩︎
The Articles and Covenants of the Church, now Doctrine and Covenants 20:1, open with "The rise of the Church of Christ in these last days." The Joseph Smith Papers editorial summary states: "The first name used to denote the church JS organized on 6 April 1830 was 'the Church of Christ.'" The current name was established by revelation (D&C 115:4) on April 26, 1838. See the Names of the Church article. Cf. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Other Concerns," pp. 119–120. ↩︎
Tim B. Heaton and Stan L. Albrecht, research on Latter-day Saint religiosity finding that members with sixteen or more years of formal education attend church at roughly seventy to eighty percent, inverting the education-activity pattern documented across most other American religious traditions. See the Anti-Intellectualism article for the full positive case, including the Church's four universities and the September Six in context. ↩︎