Anti-Intellectualism

The claim:

"Some things that are true are not very useful." (Boyd K. Packer, "The Mantle is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect," 1981)
The CES Letter argues that the Church discourages independent thinking and punishes intellectuals — citing Packer's "Mantle" talk, Dallin H. Oaks' comment that "it is wrong to criticize the leaders of the Church, even if the criticism is true," the September Six excommunications, the Strengthening Church Members Committee, and the phrase "when the prophet speaks, the debate is over."^[1]

The CES Letter's anti-intellectualism subsection is unusually quote-dense. Roughly nine direct quotations from named Church leaders carry the case, joined to the September Six disciplinary cluster of September 1993, the existence of the Strengthening Church Members Committee, and a single line ascribed to historian Richard Bushman — "the dominant narrative is not true, it can't be sustained."^[1:1] The cumulative argument culminates in what Runnells calls a syllogism: combining the quotes and structures, he writes, produces "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."^[2]

Each load-bearing quote in that case is real. The Packer "Mantle" address was delivered to a CES Symposium audience on August 22, 1981, published in BYU Studies the same year, and reprinted in the seminary preservice manual.^[3]^[4] Oaks did make the "criticism is true" comment in the 2007 PBS documentary The Mormons, and gave the 1985 CES Symposium address that contains the "not always a justification" passage.^[5]^[6] N. Eldon Tanner, First Counselor in the Kimball First Presidency, did publish "When the Prophet Speaks the Debate Is Over" as the August 1979 Ensign First Presidency Message.^[7] Six members of the Church were excommunicated or disfellowshipped in September 1993.^[8] The Strengthening Church Members Committee exists; Jeffrey R. Holland confirmed it in a March 2012 BBC interview.^[9] These are not fabrications.

But each of those quotes lives inside a paragraph the CES Letter does not show, an audience the CES Letter does not name, and an institutional record the CES Letter does not engage. Restore the audiences, the surrounding sentences, the dates, the prior and subsequent statements from the same offices, and the institutional output across the past century — and the case shrinks dramatically. It does not vanish entirely. The September Six chilling effect on Mormon studies between 1993 and roughly 2005 is real and faithfully documented by Patrick Q. Mason of Utah State University.^[10] Packer's May 1993 "three enemies" framing is indefensible as a description of legitimate scholarship. The 1981 "Mantle" talk's downstream effects, whatever Packer's intent, gave cover to local leaders who used it to discourage legitimate questions. Davis Bitton's 1966 Dialogue article on Mormon anti-intellectualism is a real piece of scholarship by a real Mormon historian — though Bitton himself walked back his 1966 framing as "selective" and "a caricature" in 2001.^[11]

What the CES Letter cannot honestly do is omit the rest of the record while presenting its quotes as the Church's position on inquiry. The Church operates four universities. Its Educational System enrolls approximately one million students worldwide.^[12] The Joseph Smith Papers Project — twenty-seven volumes, 18,822 pages, 7,452,072 words, 49,687 footnotes — is among the most ambitious documentary editing projects in American religious history.^[13] Latter-day Saint members with sixteen or more years of formal education attend church at rates of seventy to eighty percent — the inverse of the pattern documented in nearly every other American religious tradition.^[14] First Presidency member Hugh B. Brown told BYU students in 1969 that "we are not so much concerned with whether your thoughts are orthodox or heterodox as we are that you shall have thoughts."^[15] President George Albert Smith — in a December 7, 1945 letter to a Salt Lake Unitarian minister — repudiated the very phrase ("the thinking has been done") that the CES Letter elsewhere treats as Church doctrine, calling its publication "grossly to misrepresent the true ideal of the Church."^[16] Canonized scripture commands members to "seek learning, even by study and also by faith," names "intelligence" as the glory of God, and rewards knowledge eternally.^[17]^[18]^[19]

This article works through the case. It engages each of the load-bearing CES Letter quotes in the original publication context. It addresses the September Six honestly — including the documented chilling effect Mason calls a "lost generation" of Mormon studies, with the scars Mason names that did not fully heal. It engages the strongest critic-side scholars (Quinn, Anderson, the Mormon Alliance documentation) on the strongest version of their argument. And it documents the institutional positive case across six pillars: doctrine, institutions, prophetic counsel, demographics, the post-2007 transparency turn, and Bitton's own 2001 revisit. Sister articles cover topics that bleed into this one: Transparency & Censorship; Church Finances; Priesthood and Temple Ban.

Worth Acknowledging

The honest faithful response to the anti-intellectualism case is not to claim the Church has been a uniformly pro-scholarly institution across every decade and every leader's address. It hasn't. The 1993–2005 chilling effect on Mormon studies is documented by Mason — a faithful Notre Dame–PhD historian holding the Leonard J. Arrington Chair at Utah State University — as real and damaging, and Mason names scars the field still carries.^[10:1] Packer's May 1993 "three enemies" framing of "scholars or intellectuals" is indefensible as a description of legitimate scholarship. The 1981 "Mantle" talk, whatever Packer intended, was used by some local leaders to discourage legitimate historical questions. Benson's 1980 BYU "Fourteen Fundamentals in Following the Prophet" stated formulations ("the living prophet is more vital to us than the standard works"; "the prophet will never lead the Church astray") that sit in tension with the doctrine-vs-opinion framework faithful apologetics deploys when historical statements become embarrassing — and that talk has continued to be quoted approvingly by sitting senior leaders since.^[20] The post-2007 transparency turn — Joseph Smith Papers, Gospel Topics Essays, Saints multivolume history — is itself a concession that the older institutional posture had become unsustainable. Steven Snow's 2013 Religious Educator interview said this in so many words: "the world has changed in the last generation; we can't continue that pattern."^[21] The article does not pretend any of this away. What the article holds is that the both/and tradition Davis Bitton settled into in 2001 — anti-intellectual strands exist within a fundamentally pro-intellectual tradition — is more honest than either the CES Letter's "1984/North Korea" syllogism or a defensive Church-was-always-fine posture.

Restoring the load-bearing quotes

The CES Letter's anti-intellectualism case rests on roughly nine quotations from named leaders, listed below in the order Runnells presents them. For each, the relevant primary source is now available online, and each quote can be checked against the surrounding paragraphs the CES Letter omits. The pattern across the nine is consistent: audience-specific pedagogical instruction lifted out of context, a qualifying clause removed, or a counterbalancing statement from the same talk or another First Presidency document quietly omitted.

Packer 1981 — "Some things that are true are not very useful"

Boyd K. Packer's "The Mantle is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect" is the single most-cited address in the CES Letter's anti-intellectualism case. It was delivered on August 22, 1981 at the Fifth Annual Church Educational System Symposium on the Doctrine and Covenants and Church History, held at Brigham Young University.^[3:1]^[4:1] The audience consisted of seminary teachers, institute instructors, and BYU religion faculty — Church Educational System employees whose professional task was teaching faith-formation curriculum to teenagers and young adults.

Packer states the audience directly in the third paragraph:

"You seminary teachers and some of you institute and BYU men will be teaching the history of the Church this school year."^[3:2]

This audience-specific framing matters because the CES Letter applies Packer's principles as if they were general directives to historians and members. They were instructions to CES instructors about how to teach Church history in seminary and institute classrooms.

The "not very useful" passage in its full form reads:

"There is a temptation for the writer or the teacher of Church history to want to tell everything, whether it is worthy or faith promoting or not. Some things that are true are not very useful."^[3:3]

Packer follows immediately with a specific illustrative example. He recounts attending a recent lecture in which an unnamed historian had presented a series of "so-called facts" about a Church president which, "particularly when they were taken out of the context of the historical period," presented the leader "in a very unfavorable light."^[3:4] The CES Letter omits this illustrative example. With the example restored, Packer's documented concern is decontextualized presentation — facts ripped from their historical setting and arranged to maximize unfavorable impression. His concern is not factual content as such.

The "destroys faith" passage, also quoted by the CES Letter, contains qualifying clauses the CES Letter strips:

"That historian or scholar who delights in pointing out the weakness and frailties of present or past leaders destroys faith. A destroyer of faith — particularly one within the Church, and more particularly one who is employed specifically to build faith — places himself in great spiritual jeopardy."^[3:5]

Two qualifications: "delights in pointing out" specifies a disposition (the scholar who relishes tearing down) rather than a method; "particularly one… employed specifically to build faith" specifies CES employees as the relevant category, not independent historians. With both qualifiers retained, Packer is not directing a general prohibition on historical truth-telling. He is addressing seminary teachers about pedagogical responsibility within their employer-institution.

Key Point

Packer's audience for the "Mantle" address was Church Educational System employees — seminary and institute teachers responsible for faith-formation curriculum, not professional historians at an academic conference. The "not very useful" line was followed by an illustrative example about decontextualized presentation, not factual content. The "destroys faith" line was qualified by "delights in" (a disposition) and "employed specifically to build faith" (CES employees). The CES Letter's reading depends on stripping the audience, the illustrative example, and the qualifying clauses.

D. Michael Quinn — by output the most prolific Mormon historian of his generation — read his Phi Alpha Theta lecture "On Being a Mormon Historian" at BYU on December 4, 1981, three months after Packer's address.^[22] That senior LDS historians felt the talk demanded a direct response is itself evidence of how it landed. Whatever Packer intended, the published text circulated widely beyond the CES audience — BYU Studies 21:3 gave it academic-journal status; the seminary preservice manual incorporates it; the Church's official website hosts the full text.^[3:6]^[4:2] Local leaders subsequently cited it to discourage legitimate questions; Lavina Fielding Anderson's 1993 Dialogue "Contemporary Chronology" documents specific cases.^[23]

The honest engagement is layered: Packer was addressing CES instructors, not professional historians; his concern was decontextualized framing, not factual content; the qualifying clauses are real and the CES Letter strips them; and the talk's downstream effects in the broader Church were real, and the institution did not subsequently clarify or limit the talk's reach.

The Joseph-rock-in-hat reductio

The CES Letter follows the Packer quote with a rhetorical reductio:

"Joseph using a rock in a hat instead of the gold plates to translate the Book of Mormon is not a useful truth? The fact that there are multiple conflicting first vision accounts is not a useful truth? The fact that Joseph Smith was involved in polyandry while hiding it from Emma, when D&C 132:61 condemns it as 'adultery,' is not a useful truth?"^[1:2]

The reductio depends on the prior strawman — that Packer's instruction to CES seminary teachers prohibits reading the historical record. But the items Runnells lists as items the Church would have suppressed under Packer's principle are items the Church has itself published, on its own website, under its own seal, in the Gospel Topics Essays.^[24]^[25]^[26] The "Book of Mormon Translation" essay (2013) acknowledges the seer-stone-in-hat translation method directly. The "First Vision Accounts" essay (2013) acknowledges the multiple accounts and engages their differences. The "Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo" essay (2014) acknowledges the polyandry and the asymmetry with Emma.

The reductio has temporal force the rebuttal needs to acknowledge: Packer's 1981 address was used as cover, in some quarters of CES instruction and local leadership, to not surface these complications for lay members during roughly 1981–2007. The Church's later willingness to publish these essays does not retroactively undo the curricular environment in which earlier members learned the simplified version. The reductio fails as a permanent indictment because the Church now teaches what Runnells says it suppresses; it has more force as a description of a thirty-year window the Church has itself moved on from.

Oaks 1985 — "Reading Church History"

Dallin H. Oaks delivered "Reading Church History" at the Eighth Annual Church Educational System Symposium on the Doctrine and Covenants and Church History, held at Brigham Young University on August 16, 1985.^[6:1] The audience, like Packer's four years earlier, was CES instructors. Within that pedagogical setting, Oaks discussed four kinds of communications a CES teacher must distinguish: communications appropriate to public audiences versus private confidence, classroom contexts, and counseling settings. Within that framework Oaks wrote:

"The fact that something is true is not always a justification for communicating it."^[6:2]

He then offered parallel examples from the legal profession (privileged communications), medicine (patient confidentiality), and counseling (confessional privacy).^[6:3] The principle as Oaks states it is unobjectionable; the question is whether it has been deployed too broadly. Notably, Oaks's own published scholarly historical work — including his BYU Law Review article on the Carthage Conspiracy trial — covers the very period and material the CES Letter implies he wanted suppressed.^[27] An apostle who himself wrote scholarly historical work on Joseph Smith's death and the Carthage trials cannot reasonably be read as endorsing wholesale historical suppression.

Oaks 2007 PBS — "wrong to criticize"

The most-quoted Oaks line in the CES Letter case comes from Helen Whitney's April 2007 PBS American Experience / Frontline documentary The Mormons. The CES Letter quotes Oaks as saying: "It is wrong to criticize the leaders of the Church, even if the criticism is true."^[1:3] The PBS interview transcript is publicly available; the full Oaks passage as widely reproduced from the long-form interview reads:

"It's wrong to criticize leaders of the Church, even if the criticism is true, because it diminishes their effectiveness as a servant of the Lord. One can work to correct them by some other means, but don't go about saying that they misbehaved when they were a youngster or whatever. Well, of course, that's not really legal contempt of court. The Lord doesn't speak of contempt, but the principle is the same."^[5:1]

Three things are visible once the surrounding sentences are restored. First, Oaks's stated rationale is consequentialist — he is concerned about effect on a leader's ministry, not about factual accuracy as such. Second, Oaks immediately qualifies the principle: "one can work to correct them by some other means" preserves a path for legitimate corrective engagement. Third, Oaks's parallel is the legal-procedural concept of contempt of court: a procedural restraint on manner of criticism, not a substantive ban on critical thought.

The faithful position is not that Oaks's framing is unobjectionable. The "even if the criticism is true" formulation is awkward, and the qualifications can be read as making the principle slippery — once "manner" rather than "content" is the load-bearing distinction, the line between legitimate criticism and "evil-speaking" depends on the listener's discretion. But the CES Letter's reading — that Oaks endorsed silencing factual criticism — is materially weaker than what Oaks said in context. Oaks's principle is closer to "criticize leaders carefully and constructively rather than destructively" than to "never criticize leaders at all."

Tanner 1979 and the 1945 Ward Teachers' Message

N. Eldon Tanner, First Counselor in the Spencer W. Kimball First Presidency, published "When the Prophet Speaks the Debate Is Over" as the August 1979 Ensign First Presidency Message.^[7:1] The CES Letter cites this as evidence that a First Presidency member, in an Ensign First Presidency Message, instructed members to stop debating once the prophet has spoken.^[1:4] But Tanner does not coin the phrase. He attributes it explicitly:

"Sister Cannon's wonderful words…"^[7:2]

The "Sister Cannon" is Elaine A. Cannon, then Young Women General President, who used the line at a churchwide fireside for women in November 1978. Tanner is repeating Cannon's phrase approvingly, not articulating new doctrine. The chain of attribution matters because the CES Letter presents the quote as if it embodied the Church's settled teaching. It is one First Counselor approvingly citing one auxiliary president from a fireside.

The deeper history matters more. The Tanner formulation echoes a 1945 Ward Teachers' Message published in Improvement Era 48, no. 6 (June 1945), titled "Sustaining the General Authorities of the Church." The 1945 message contained the line:

"When our leaders speak, the thinking has been done. When they propose a plan — it is God's plan. When they point the way, there is no other which is safe. When they give direction, it should mark the end of controversy."^[28]

This message was distributed to every ward as a script for the monthly visiting-priesthood lesson (ward teaching, the precursor to home teaching). It is, on its face, the strongest possible articulation of the position the CES Letter ascribes to the Church.

It was also explicitly repudiated. J. Raymond Cope, minister of the First Unitarian Society of Salt Lake City, wrote to George Albert Smith — sitting Church President since May 1945 — expressing dismay at the message. Smith's reply, dated December 7, 1945, addresses the question directly:

"I am pleased to assure you that you are right in your attitude that the passage quoted does not express the true position of the Church. Even to imply that members of the Church are not to do their own thinking is grossly to misrepresent the true ideal of the Church… Mutual respect for each other's right to disagree is fundamental to the freedom which the Restored Gospel guarantees."^[16:1]

Smith continues that every member is "personally responsible to His Maker" and that the Church teaches members to "think and act for themselves." A 1946 letter from Albert E. Bowen of the Quorum of the Twelve to University of Utah sociologist Dean Brimhall identified the Improvement Era message as having been written by an unnamed clerk in the Presiding Bishop's office and distributed without an authorizing review by the General Authorities.^[29]

This is the single most important counter-source in the entire article. The only direct First Presidency statement on the underlying claim — the exact phrase the CES Letter cites as evidence of Church anti-intellectualism, "the thinking has been done" — was repudiated by the prophet of the Church months after publication. The statement was identified as the work of an unauthorized clerk. The CES Letter cites Tanner 1979 as if it embodied settled Church teaching while omitting that Tanner is repeating a fireside line, that the underlying 1945 formulation was repudiated by the prophet, and that the Church's internal record identifies the original publication as unauthorized.

Cook 2012, Uchtdorf 2013, Andersen 2014 — the "internet" cluster

The CES Letter assembles three October General Conference quotations across 2012–2014 as evidence of "anti-internet rhetoric" from the Church. Each is real, and each loses much of its rhetorical force once the surrounding paragraphs are restored.

Quentin L. Cook, in his October 2012 General Conference address "Can Ye Feel So Now?", said:

"Some have immersed themselves in internet materials that magnify, exaggerate, and, in some cases, invent shortcomings of early Church leaders. Then they draw incorrect conclusions that can affect testimony. Any who have made these choices can repent and be spiritually renewed."^[30]

The CES Letter reads this as a blanket framing of online research as something to repent of. But Cook's qualifying language is "magnify, exaggerate, and, in some cases, invent" — not "research" as a category. In 2012 the genuinely invented material was real and indexed: the Mark Hofmann forgeries (the "Salamander Letter" and other fabricated documents accepted as authentic by the academic community for several years before exposure), the Ed Decker / God Makers falsehoods, and recycled nineteenth-century anti-Mormon claims were all in regular online recirculation.^[31] Cook's distinction is between magnification and invention on the one hand and accurate documentation on the other.

Dieter F. Uchtdorf's January 2013 BYU CES Devotional "What Is Truth?" — the talk Runnells cites for the flat-earth/hologram passage — is a sustained call for honest, courageous inquiry. The flat-earth/hologram trio appears in the talk as an illustrative example of the broader epistemic point that frequent repetition is not evidence:

"Remember that in this age of information there are many who create doubt about anything and everything at any time and every place. You will find even those who still claim that they have evidence that the earth is flat. That the moon is a hologram… and that certain movie stars are really aliens from another planet. And it is always good to keep in mind just because something is printed on paper, appears on the internet, is frequently repeated or has a powerful group of followers doesn't make it true."^[32]

But the talk's actual thrust is in the surrounding paragraphs — passages the CES Letter does not quote:

"The search for truth has led millions of people to faith in God… Latter-day Saints are not asked to blindly accept everything they hear. We are encouraged to think and discover truth for ourselves."^[32:1]

Uchtdorf is not making a parallel between Church-history concerns and flat-earthism. He is using a familiar pop-cultural example of widespread-but-false claims to introduce a broader point about epistemic care, then explicitly affirming that members are encouraged to "think and discover truth for ourselves."

Uchtdorf's October 2013 General Conference talk "Come, Join with Us" — the talk that contains the famous "doubt your doubts" line the CES Letter cites — is in the same vein. The line in question reads in full:

"Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters — my dear friends — please, first doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith. We must never allow doubt to hold us prisoner and keep us from the divine love, peace, and gifts that come through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ."^[33]

The surrounding paragraphs the CES Letter omits include:

"It's natural to have questions — the acorn of honest inquiry has often sprouted and matured into a great oak of understanding. There are few members of the Church who, at one time or another, have not wrestled with serious or sensitive questions."^[33:1]

"In this Church that honors personal agency so strongly, that was restored by a young man who asked questions and sought answers, we respect those who honestly search for truth."^[33:2]

"And, to be perfectly frank, there have been times when members or leaders in the Church have simply made mistakes. There may have been things said or done that were not in harmony with our values, principles, or doctrine."^[33:3]

The third quotation is unusual: a sitting member of the First Presidency, in General Conference, publicly acknowledging that members and leaders have made mistakes. That is not anti-intellectualism. It is a member of the First Presidency conceding the kind of historical complication the CES Letter elsewhere argues the Church refuses to admit.

The "doubt your doubts" formulation can fairly be read as rhetorically asymmetric — it asks doubt to be tested but does not, on its face, ask faith to be tested. That asymmetry deserves to be named rather than waved past.^[34]

Neil L. Andersen's October 2014 General Conference address "Joseph Smith" — which the CES Letter also cites — contains the "no truth filter" passage:

"We might remind the sincere inquirer that Internet information does not have a 'truth' filter. Some information, no matter how convincing, is simply not true."^[35]

The CES Letter reads this as institutional opposition to research. But Andersen's surrounding paragraphs reference the Mark Hofmann forgeries directly — the documentary case where well-presented forged documents (including the "Salamander Letter") were accepted as authentic by the academic community for several years before exposure.^[35:1]^[31:1] Andersen's principle is grounded in a documented case where careful historians were deceived by convincing-but-false material. The CES Letter is right that Andersen's framing of "the internet" as a category was rhetorically lopsided — older mediums also have no automatic truth filter, and the medium-vs-content distinction matters. But Andersen's substantive concern is not the medium but the Hofmann-style problem of well-presented falsehood.

Benson 1980 — "Fourteen Fundamentals in Following the Prophet"

Of the load-bearing quotes the CES Letter does not directly cite but circles, Ezra Taft Benson's February 26, 1980 BYU devotional address "Fourteen Fundamentals in Following the Prophet" is the deepest stress point.^[20:1] Benson, then a member of the Quorum of the Twelve, listed fourteen propositions about prophetic authority. Two have been the subjects of internal debate ever since:

Fundamental 2: "The living prophet is more vital to us than the standard works."
Fundamental 4: "The prophet will never lead the Church astray."^[20:2]

Both are accurate to Benson's text; the talk is hosted at speeches.byu.edu and has been quoted approvingly by sitting apostles since.^[20:3] The faithful position cannot dismiss it as fringe.

The framework's own internal corrective was operative in real time: Spencer W. Kimball, the sitting Church President in 1980, called Benson in to discuss the talk afterward, per Edward L. Kimball's Lengthen Your Stride and corroborated by D. Michael Quinn and by Gregory Prince.^[36]^[37]^[38] Kimball's reported concern was that the talk could be read as elevating the living prophet over the canon.

The deeper interpretive challenge is that the talk has functional currency in the contemporary Church. Benson became Church President from 1985 to 1994 and never disowned the talk. The October 2010 General Conference featured two members of the Seventy quoting "Fourteen Fundamentals" extensively, including the formulations above.^[39] The "Benson was just one apostle" defense becomes weaker the longer the talk's formulations are reaffirmed in subsequent General Conferences. The doctrine-vs-opinion distinction does real work for isolated apostolic statements subsequently not reaffirmed; it does considerably less work when the statement is repeatedly reaffirmed verbatim from a General Conference pulpit thirty years after delivery.^[40] Resolving the deeper tension requires engaging the broader prophetic-authority question, which is properly the subject of the Prophets section.

The honest faithful response: the talk overstated; the sitting prophet at the time had reservations; the talk has not been canonized; the broader LDS canon and tradition (D&C 88:118; Joseph Smith's January 1834 letter; Hugh B. Brown 1969) sustains a different conscience-and-canon balance — and the continued reaffirmation by senior leadership is a real interpretive challenge that the doctrine-vs-opinion framework does not fully absorb.^[36:1]^[15:1]

Bushman's "dominant narrative"

The CES Letter places Richard Bushman's "the dominant narrative is not true; it can't be sustained" line on the cover of its "Other Concerns" section and reprises it within the Anti-Intellectualism subsection.^[1:5] Runnells presents the line as Bushman — the most respected faithful Mormon historian alive — having concluded that the Church's public narrative cannot be defended.

The phrase comes from a Q&A response Bushman gave at a small fireside at Mark England's home on June 12, 2016.^[41] Critic-side recirculation typically strips the surrounding context. But Bushman's actual position — repeated across his published books, blog posts, and the Religious Educator's "Conversations with Mormon Historians" interview — is that the institutional narrative as historically packaged for lay consumption in correlation materials needs to be replaced with the more complex story documented by historians, without abandoning faith.^[42] In the Religious Educator interview, asked directly whether his historical research had shaken his faith in Joseph Smith, Bushman answered: "I can truthfully answer these uneasy people no."^[42:1] Asked the same question in a 2023 Deseret News profile, Bushman said his research "didn't change… my mind about believing Joseph Smith was a visionary and a prophet."^[43]

Bushman remains a faithful member of the Church, a stake patriarch, and a frequent participant at Maxwell Institute and BYU events. His "dominant narrative" critique, in his actual published statements, is a critique of correlation-era public packaging — the Sunday-school cartoon version of Church history that omitted polyandry, the rock-in-hat translation, the multiple First Vision accounts, the Book of Abraham complications. Having spent a career on those documented complications and written Rough Stone Rolling — the most comprehensive faithful biography of Joseph Smith yet produced — he remains a vocal defender of the Restoration's truth claims.^[44]^[42:2]

The crucial point the article should name honestly: Bushman's underlying observation about the gap between correlation-era public packaging and the documented historical record is the same observation Runnells is making in the CES Letter. The Sunday-school cartoon version of Joseph Smith was real, and a typical member who absorbed that cartoon for thirty years and then encountered the documented record could experience legitimate disorientation. Where Bushman and Runnells differ is not in that observation — they share it — but in the conclusions drawn from it. Bushman concludes the truth claims of the Restoration survive the documented complications; Runnells concludes they do not. The post-2013 institutional response (Gospel Topics Essays, Saints, the Joseph Smith Papers) is the Church's own substantive engagement with that gap.^[24:1]^[25:1]^[26:1]^[13:1] Cross-link to Transparency & Censorship for the fuller Bushman treatment.

The September Six and the documented chilling effect

In September 1993, six members of the Church were excommunicated or disfellowshipped within a single month. The CES Letter cites this as the Church punishing scholars for scholarly work, and connects it to Boyd K. Packer's May 18, 1993 address to the All-Church Coordinating Council in which Packer identified "the gay-lesbian movement, the feminist movement (both of which are relatively new), and the ever present challenge from the so-called scholars or intellectuals" as "the dangers I speak of."^[1:6]^[45]

The faithful response that survives the strongest critical case has to do four things at once: acknowledge the chilling effect, document the differences among the six cases, name where Packer's framing is indefensible, and document the institutional response in the years since.

The six names and their cases

The six individuals, in approximate chronological order of disciplinary action:

Lavina Fielding Anderson — Excommunicated for her Dialogue 26:1 (Spring 1993) "Contemporary Chronology" of LDS leadership-intellectual conflicts and her associated activism.^[23:1] She continued attending her ward faithfully for approximately thirty years until her death October 29, 2023. Her membership was restored posthumously in November 2024 — Salt Lake Tribune reporter Peggy Fletcher Stack covered the rebaptism in detail.^[46]
D. Michael Quinn — The most prolific historian of his generation. His scholarly output includes J. Reuben Clark: The Church Years (1983), Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (1987), The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power (1994 — published after his excommunication), and Same-Sex Dynamics Among Nineteenth-Century Americans: A Mormon Example (1996).^[47] Quinn refused to attend his disciplinary council, citing — in his own subsequent retrospective — the conviction that the disciplinary process was unjust and that his historical work was being used as pretext.^[47:1] The disciplinary letter cited "conduct unbecoming" and "other matters not related to your historical writings."^[48] Quinn died on April 21, 2021.
The Quinn case is the article's hardest to adjudicate. His earlier scholarly work — the J. Reuben Clark volume written under faithful Church History Division auspices, the Phi Alpha Theta lecture engaging Packer 1981 as a serious methodological argument, the magic-world-view research that became the 1987 book — is careful documentary historical work, not "delight in" tearing down in Packer's sense. The honest framing: Quinn was excommunicated as a serious historian doing serious work, in a period when the institution had limited tolerance for the implications of that work for some sensitive topics. The discipline was not for delight in Packer's sense; it was for serious work the institution couldn't tolerate.^[49]
Paul Toscano — Excommunicated for public rhetoric. His "ichneumon flies" line and his Book of Mormon "great and spacious building" comparisons of Church leadership were the documented triggers.^[23:2] Toscano's case turned on rhetorical confrontation rather than scholarly publication. The "six excommunications for scholarly publication" framing does not fit the Toscano case.
Maxine Hanks — Editor of Women and Authority: Re-emerging Mormon Feminism (1992). Excommunicated in September 1993; rebaptized February 2012, with Peggy Fletcher Stack covering the rebaptism for the Salt Lake Tribune.^[50]
Lynne Kanavel Whitesides — Disfellowshipped (the lightest disciplinary action available). Her public Mormon Women's Forum activities were the cited basis.^[23:3]
Avraham Gileadi — Isaiah scholar; excommunicated September 1993; rebaptized in 1996, approximately three years after his excommunication, per Deseret News reporting at the time. Gileadi's quoted reflection in the Deseret News coverage was: "In my heart I've never felt like I've had an apostate spirit."^[51]

Three of the six were ultimately restored to fellowship — Gileadi in 1996, Hanks in 2012, Anderson posthumously in 2024.^[51:1]^[50:1]^[46:1] The cases also differ substantially from one another. Toscano's case turned on rhetoric rather than scholarship; Whitesides was disfellowshipped (the lightest action available); Gileadi's case was an Isaiah-scholarship dispute that was reconsidered within three years; Hanks was a feminist-anthology editor whose public activism was at issue; Anderson was disciplined for a chronology of leadership-intellectual conflicts that was itself a piece of scholarship; Quinn was the most prolific historian and the most contested case, and the discipline cannot honestly be characterized as anything other than a senior scholar being excommunicated against the backdrop of institutionally controversial historical work.

The "six excommunications for scholarly publication" framing flattens these differences. It is not factually accurate to treat all six as a single category. But it is also not adequate to disaggregate the six cases as if they had no common element. Five of the six were excommunicated within a thirty-day window; that the cluster occurred is itself a fact, regardless of how the individual cases differ.

The figure preserves the chronology Mason 2023 documents: five of six excommunicated within a thirty-day window in September 1993, and three of six restored across three different decades — Gileadi within three years, Hanks after almost nineteen, Anderson posthumously after thirty-one. Three tracks (Quinn, Toscano, Whitesides) have no restoration marker. The partial-recovery pattern is what stands out — and what does not.

What the chilling effect actually was

Patrick Q. Mason — who holds the Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University, holds a PhD in history from the University of Notre Dame, and remains a faithful Latter-day Saint — published "The September Six and the Lost Generation of Mormon Studies" in Dialogue 56, no. 3 (Fall 2023).^[10:2] Mason's argument is the strongest faithful articulation of the chilling-effect critique: the September 1993 disciplinary actions, regardless of their individual merits, sent a clear institutional message that sufficiently rigorous historical work touching sensitive topics would be met with discipline. Young LDS scholars learned to self-censor. Many promising historians left the field. The result, Mason argues, was a "lost generation" of Mormon studies, lasting roughly from 1993 to 2005, in which the field stagnated and the most ambitious documentary work moved either out of Church-affiliated venues or, where it continued, proceeded with significant self-imposed restraints.^[10:3]

Mason's article is faithful — published in Dialogue by a Notre Dame–PhD historian holding an endowed chair at a state university — and that faithfulness is what makes the article diagnostic. The faithful position has to engage Mason on his merits, not pretend the chilling effect is fictional.

Mason also documents the post-2005 recovery: the Joseph Smith Papers (begun 2008, completed 2023); the Gospel Topics Essays (2013–2015); the Maxwell Institute's 2012 restructuring; Steven Snow's tenure as Church Historian (2012–2019); the Saints multivolume narrative history (2018–2024).^[10:4]^[21:1]^[13:2]^[52]

Crucially, Mason does not present this as a clean before-and-after recovery. He argues the recovery is partial, that scars persist, and that the field still bears the marks of the 1993–2005 period — Quinn never held a permanent academic appointment after his excommunication and survived on grant funding for the rest of his career; Anderson was never reintegrated into faithful institutional scholarly life; Toscano's trajectory diverged permanently from any plausible alternative within faithful institutional Mormonism; and the absence of certain critical perspectives in current LDS scholarship remains itself a continuing cost of the period.^[10:5]

This is the honest version: yes, the post-2007 institutional output is real and substantive; and Mason — the faithful historian whose authority the article leans on — names what was permanently lost. The article cites Mason as he wrote, not a more reassuring version of him.

The honest faithful position: the September Six caused a documented chilling effect; three of six cases were ultimately reversed; the cases differ substantially in their triggers; the post-2007 institutional response is real and substantive; faithful scholars (Bushman, BYU religion faculty, the Maxwell Institute under Fluhman) continued to produce serious work throughout; but the chilling effect was real, faithful scholars learned to operate around it, and Mason names scars that persist.

Packer's May 1993 "three enemies"

Boyd K. Packer's May 18, 1993 address to the All-Church Coordinating Council — an internal meeting of correlation department heads and General Authorities — identified "the gay-lesbian movement, the feminist movement (both of which are relatively new), and the ever present challenge from the so-called scholars or intellectuals" as "the dangers I speak of."^[45:1] The talk was leaked rather than published. The CES Letter cites it on p. 124, juxtaposing the "three enemies" framing with the disciplinary cluster four months later in September.^[1:7]

Two facts about this talk:

First, the framing of "scholars or intellectuals" as one of three "dangers" or "enemies" of the Church is indefensible as a description of legitimate scholarship. Whatever Packer intended, framing scholarship-as-such as a category of danger is wrong as a description of legitimate inquiry. The "so-called" qualifier — "the so-called scholars or intellectuals" — does some work; it implies Packer is targeting a specific subset of public-facing dissent rather than scholarship as a category. But the document's overall framing is a category-level indictment, and the qualifier is not enough to rehabilitate it. The article should not pretend otherwise.

Second, the talk was an internal address to the All-Church Coordinating Council, leaked rather than published. It is not a public sermon to the membership. This contextualization does not erase the chilling effect — the talk leaked, circulated widely, and was understood by scholars in the field as setting the institutional tone for what would happen four months later. The mitigation matters as a fact about the talk's official status; it does not erase the talk's actual effect.

The proximity between Packer's May 1993 address and the September disciplinary cluster is suggestive of institutional tone-setting, not a documented causal chain. The disciplinary councils were stake-level (and one regional), not directives from the Quorum of the Twelve. The proximity is not a coincidence the faithful side can wave away — but it is a tone-setting proximity rather than a documented chain of command.

The honest faithful response: Packer's "three enemies" framing was wrong. The Church has not made it canon. No subsequent General Conference address has reaffirmed it. The framing has aged into something closer to an embarrassment than a reaffirmation, and the post-2007 transparency turn implicitly contradicts it.

The Strengthening Church Members Committee

The CES Letter describes the Strengthening Church Members Committee (SCMC) as "the spying and monitoring arm of the Church… secretive and most members have been unaware of its existence since its creation in 1985 after Ezra Taft Benson became president."^[1:8]

Several of the load-bearing facts can be checked. The committee was formed during Ezra Taft Benson's presidency, soon after he became Church President in November 1985.^[53] The committee's stated purpose, per FAIR's documentation, was originally to monitor public statements of members claiming Church authority for breakaway polygamist offshoot groups. The committee's existence was first publicly discovered in 1991 when a 1990 memo from Glen L. Pace (then Second Counselor in the Presiding Bishopric, 1985–1989, and from 1992 a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy) referencing the committee was leaked, drawing public attention to its operation.^[53:1]

Jeffrey R. Holland publicly confirmed the committee's existence in a March 2012 BBC documentary "The Mormon Candidate," covering Mitt Romney's presidential campaign. Holland's stated framing in the BBC interview was that the committee was "born some years ago to protect against predatory practices of polygamists" and was "primarily there to guard against polygamy." Holland also acknowledged that he was "not on that committee" and did not "know much about it."^[9:1] Holland's explanation focused on members publicly teaching false doctrine — particularly polygamist groups falsely claiming Church authority. The CES Letter quotes Holland's acknowledgment but disputes the polygamy framing.^[1:9]

The faithful position on SCMC has to walk a narrow line.

First, the committee exists. The CES Letter is correct that it was kept relatively low-profile for years and that many members were unaware of it before the 1991 disclosure. Holland's 2012 confirmation is a public acknowledgment, and the faithful response cannot deflect the existence question.

Second, the now-performed-by-Google framing has partial force but does not address the load-bearing concern.^[53:2] The structural difference between information-gathering and ecclesiastical follow-through is real. A Google search returns information to a member of the public, with no ecclesiastical consequences attached unless a bishop or stake president separately acts on it. An SCMC dossier, by definition, has had institutional attention drawn to a member's statements for the purpose of informing ecclesiastical action. These are categorically different.

Third, a more honest narrowing of the defense lives at scope, not existence. Holland's framing — polygamist offshoots claiming Church authority, members publicly teaching false doctrine — covers a category most institutions handle in some way (denominations have heresy procedures, professional associations have ethics codes). The serious question is whether the SCMC's scope has stayed within the polygamist-offshoots framing or expanded beyond it. The 1990s evidence — the Anderson and Quinn cases — suggests the scope at times included scholarly disputes that were not polygamist-offshoot teaching. That scope-expansion is the legitimate concern.

The honest position: the "1984/North Korea" framing is wrong; the structurally serious version of the concern — particularly the documented scope-expansion in particular cases — is fair to engage rather than deflect.

Davis Bitton 1966 and 2001

Davis Bitton's 1966 Dialogue article "Anti-Intellectualism in Mormon History" is the foundational scholarly treatment of the topic the CES Letter trades on.^[54] Bitton — then a young historian, later Assistant Church Historian under Leonard Arrington (1972–1982) — surveyed nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mormon attitudes toward higher education and identified populist-anti-elite strands. His conclusion: real, but coexisting with strong pro-intellectual currents. James B. Allen's response in the same issue qualified Bitton's framing with countervailing data.^[55]

What is distinctive about Bitton's scholarship — and important for the article — is that Bitton himself revisited the 1966 thesis 35 years later. "Mormon Anti-Intellectualism: A Reply," published in FARMS Review 13, no. 2 (2001): 59–62, is Bitton's own critical re-examination of his foundational essay.^[11:1] Bitton, by then Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Utah, wrote:

"[My 1966 essay] was a selective examination of certain expressions and incidents… The result, I now think, was something of a caricature."^[11:2]

"Looking back, I think some of [my interpretations] were one-sided, dependent on assumptions that I would no longer consider trustworthy without further consideration of context."^[11:3]

"We can look at [Mormonism] from different angles. From one perspective there is, for example, an authoritarian dimension. From another, individuals are encouraged to seek their own spiritual experience and find their own balance and direction. Mormon culture is not a question of either/or… it is both/and."^[11:4]

The 2001 piece is published in the FARMS Review, the peer-reviewed publication of the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (later absorbed into the Maxwell Institute). The combination of (a) a senior LDS historian, (b) revisiting his own foundational essay, (c) substantially walking back its sharpest formulations, (d) in a peer-reviewed faithful venue is unusual and important.

Key Point

Davis Bitton's 1966 Dialogue essay introduced "Anti-Intellectualism in Mormon History" as a scholarly framing. Bitton himself revisited the essay in 2001 in the FARMS Review and acknowledged the 1966 framing was "selective" and produced "something of a caricature." His mature conclusion was both/and: real anti-intellectual strands exist within a fundamentally pro-intellectual tradition. The CES Letter's case relies on a 1966 framing the original author repudiated in 2001.

The institutional positive case

The CES Letter's anti-intellectualism case rests on a small set of leader quotes plus the September Six and the SCMC. The institutional positive case is much larger. It runs across six pillars: doctrine, institutions, prophetic counsel, demographics, the post-2007 transparency turn, and Bitton's 2001 revisit.

Doctrine

Latter-day Saint canonized scripture commands the pursuit of learning. The texts are not obscure proof passages; they are among the most-cited verses in the tradition.

"Seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith." (Doctrine and Covenants 88:118)^[17:1]

"The glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth." (Doctrine and Covenants 93:36)^[18:1]

"Whatever principle of intelligence we attain unto in this life, it will rise with us in the resurrection. And if a person gains more knowledge and intelligence in this life through his diligence and obedience than another, he will have so much the advantage in the world to come." (Doctrine and Covenants 130:18–19)^[19:1]

"If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things." (Articles of Faith 1:13)^[56]

"We believe all that God has revealed, all that He does now reveal, and we believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things." (Articles of Faith 1:9)^[57]

A doctrinal framework that commands "study and also by faith," exalts "intelligence" as God's glory, rewards knowledge eternally, demands seeking after "the best books," welcomes all that is praiseworthy regardless of source, and expects continuing revelation is the opposite of an anti-intellectual framework. The CES Letter's case requires ignoring every one of these passages. D&C 88:118 has been the institutional motto of BYU and the broader Church Educational System for decades.

Institutions

The Church operates four institutions of higher education: Brigham Young University (Provo), BYU-Idaho, BYU-Hawaii, and Ensign College. BYU-Pathway Worldwide adds an online-and-in-person undergraduate pathway in 180+ countries. Combined enrollment in CES higher education in the 2023–2024 academic year:

117,204 enrolled in BYU / BYU-Idaho / BYU-Hawaii / Ensign College combined
Approximately 70,000 in BYU-Pathway Worldwide across 180+ countries
427,642 in seminary (an all-time high)
384,095 in institute (an all-time high)
Combined CES enrollment approaching 1 million students

The Church Newsroom's 2023 release reports these figures.^[12:1]

BYU's research output and rankings: top 110 National Universities (U.S. News, 2026); No. 36 on the Forbes Top 100 list (2025); top 25 in the Wall Street Journal college rankings; No. 5 yield rate nationally at 78% (just behind Harvard and Stanford and ahead of Princeton and Yale); No. 3 among doctoral research institutions for Fulbright Scholars (2023).^[58] BYU's scholarly output includes more than 60,000 academic publications with over 1.6 million citations.^[59] The Biology Department has taught evolution since 1971; the Religious Studies Center has been publishing scholarly books since 1975; BYU Studies Quarterly, founded in 1959, is the oldest continuously published Mormon studies journal.^[60]

The scholarly ecosystem is unmatched by any religious tradition of comparable size. Church-funded or sponsored: BYU Studies Quarterly (1959); the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship (successor to FARMS, restructured beginning in 2012, with Spencer Fluhman appointed editor of the Mormon Studies Review in March 2013 and executive director of the Maxwell Institute by 2016); the Religious Studies Center (1975); Scripture Central (formerly Book of Mormon Central — KnoWhys, Evidence Central, comprehensive digital archive); Pearl of Great Price Central; the Religious Educator journal.^[61]^[62]^[63] Independent: Sunstone (1974); Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought (1966); the Journal of Mormon History (1974, founded by the Mormon History Association). The Interpreter Foundation publishes a peer-reviewed open-access journal that has run dozens of articles annually since 2012.^[62:1]

The independent journals are particularly diagnostic. Sunstone and Dialogue are not Church-controlled; they have published critical work for decades. The Church has never moved to suppress either. Their continued existence — for fifty-plus years in the case of Dialogue and Sunstone — is itself counterevidence to the censorship narrative. An anti-intellectual institution does not tolerate two large independent peer-reviewed journals devoted to its own historical and doctrinal questions for half a century.

The Joseph Smith Papers Project is the flagship documentary effort. Across 22 years (2001–2023), Church Historian's Press published 27 volumes containing 18,822 pages, 7,452,072 words, 49,687 footnotes, 1,306 journal entries, 643 letters, and 155 revelations — all available open-access at josephsmithpapers.org.^[13:3]^[64] The project received the imprimatur of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the National Archives' grant-and-endorsement arm for documentary editing.^[65] Scholarly endorsements include Thomas P. Slaughter (University of Rochester), who called the Papers "the gold standard in the field of historical documentary editing"; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (Pulitzer-winning Harvard historian), who said "the Church didn't want to hide anything about Joseph Smith"; and Laurie Maffly-Kipp (Washington University), who said the Papers "ranks with the best kinds of scholarly sources I've seen."^[65:1]

The Joseph Smith Papers is exactly the opposite of suppression. A genuinely anti-intellectual institution does not commission, peer-review, and digitally publish 7.45 million words of primary-source material — including its founder's most difficult diaries, letters, and revelations — to National Archives standards. The CES Letter cites Steven Snow's 2013 admission that "in the past there was a tendency to keep records closed." But the Joseph Smith Papers began publishing in 2008. The Church was already five-plus years into the most aggressive transparency project in its history when Snow gave that interview, and twelve years into it before the CES Letter's 2017 update. Snow's quote is not evidence of ongoing concealment; it is the Church Historian publicly acknowledging an old pattern that the Joseph Smith Papers itself was the institutional answer to.

Prophetic counsel

The CES Letter's case selects a small handful of quotes. The body of teaching from prophets and apostles affirming intellectual freedom dwarfs that sample. A representative set:

Hugh B. Brown, First Counselor in the David O. McKay First Presidency, in his BYU devotional "An Eternal Quest — Freedom of the Mind" (May 13, 1969):

"One of the most important things in the world is freedom of the mind; from this all other freedoms spring. Such freedom is necessarily dangerous, for one cannot think right without running the risk of thinking wrong."^[15:2]

"We call upon you students to exercise your God-given right to think through every proposition that is submitted to you and to be unafraid to express your opinions, with proper respect for those to whom you talk and proper acknowledgment of your own shortcomings. We are not so much concerned with whether your thoughts are orthodox or heterodox as we are that you shall have thoughts."^[15:3]

"Be unafraid of new ideas, for they are the stepping stones of progress… We have been blessed with much knowledge by revelation from God which, in some part, the world lacks. But there is an incomprehensibly greater part of truth which we must yet discover."^[15:4]

This is a First Presidency member, at BYU's flagship religious-education venue, explicitly endorsing intellectual freedom in 1969 and saying the Church does not care whether students' thoughts are orthodox or heterodox so long as they have thoughts. Stand this next to Packer 1981 and the rhetorical asymmetry is real and measurable. The CES Letter's "anti-intellectual Church" thesis cannot be reconciled with this address.

George Albert Smith, sitting Church President, in his December 7, 1945 letter to J. Raymond Cope:

"Even to imply that members of the Church are not to do their own thinking is grossly to misrepresent the true ideal of the Church… Mutual respect for each other's right to disagree is fundamental to the freedom which the Restored Gospel guarantees."^[16:2]

The exact phrase the CES Letter cites as evidence of Church anti-intellectualism — "the thinking has been done" — was publicly repudiated by the prophet of the Church months after publication. The original publication was identified by Albert E. Bowen of the Twelve as the work of an unauthorized clerk.^[29:1]

James E. Talmage, member of the Quorum of the Twelve, in The Vitality of Mormonism: Brief Essays on Distinctive Doctrines (Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1919), Essay 8 ("Divine Command and Human Agency—The Church a Democracy"):

"God has not established His Church to make of its members irresponsible automatons, nor to exact from them blind obedience."^[66]

Talmage was an apostle (called 1911) and a working scholar with an earned PhD in geology when he wrote The Vitality of Mormonism. The "irresponsible automatons" passage explicitly frames intellectual activity and agency as a religious obligation, not an optional feature.

Joseph Smith, in his January 22, 1834 letter to the elders of the Church in Kirtland and abroad, published in the Times and Seasons and reprinted in History of the Church 2:6–7:

"All have the privilege of thinking for themselves upon all matters relative to conscience."^[67]

"I teach them correct principles, and they govern themselves."^[68]

Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses 9:150 (sermon dated January 12, 1862, "Eternal Punishment—'Mormonism,' &c"):

"I am more afraid that this people have so much confidence in their leaders that they will not inquire for themselves of God whether they are led by Him."^[69]

The second prophet of the Church explicitly warning against members over-trusting their leaders rather than seeking confirmation directly from God.

Russell M. Nelson, current Church President, at the dedication of BYU's Life Sciences Building (April 9, 2015):

"There is no conflict between science and religion. Conflict only arises from an incomplete knowledge of either science or religion — or both."^[70]

"All truth is part of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Whether truth comes from a scientific laboratory or by revelation from the Lord, it is compatible."^[70:1]

"Research and education are religious responsibilities for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, for we know that 'the glory of God is intelligence.'"^[70:2]

The current prophet explicitly framing research and education as religious responsibilities — at the dedication of a science building.

Dieter F. Uchtdorf, in the same October 2013 General Conference talk the CES Letter cites for "doubt your doubts":

"It's natural to have questions — the acorn of honest inquiry has often sprouted and matured into a great oak of understanding."^[33:4]

"In this Church that honors personal agency so strongly, that was restored by a young man who asked questions and sought answers, we respect those who honestly search for truth."^[33:5]

The CES Letter quotes the "doubt your doubts" sentence and ignores the surrounding paragraphs that explicitly affirm questioning. "Doubt your doubts" was not a command to stop thinking; it was an invitation to apply the same scrutiny to one's doubts that one applies to one's faith. That is, by definition, an intellectual exercise.

The apostle-scientist tradition

The Quorum of the Twelve has, across the past century, included a substantial number of professional scientists called precisely because of their scholarly stature in their fields:

James E. Talmage — PhD in geology, Illinois Wesleyan, 1896; member of the Quorum of the Twelve from 1911^[66:1]
John A. Widtsoe — PhD in chemistry, Göttingen, 1899; president of Utah Agricultural College and the University of Utah; member of the Twelve from 1921
Joseph F. Merrill — PhD in physics, Johns Hopkins, 1899; member of the Twelve from 1931
Russell M. Nelson — pioneering cardiothoracic surgeon; member of the Twelve from 1984; Church President from 2018
Richard G. Scott — nuclear engineer, served on the Submarine Nuclear Project under Admiral Rickover; member of the Twelve from 1988
Dallin H. Oaks — University of Chicago Law professor; Utah Supreme Court Justice; member of the Twelve from 1984; First Counselor in the First Presidency from 2018

This is not amateurs dabbling. Talmage held an earned PhD in geology three decades before the Quorum of the Twelve called him; Widtsoe was president of two major state universities before his apostolic call; Merrill was a Johns Hopkins-trained physicist; Nelson was a globally recognized cardiothoracic surgeon. An anti-intellectual institution does not call its leaders from the most rigorous scholarly disciplines available. The institutional pattern is the inverse of what the CES Letter's framing predicts. The recent apostolic pattern has tilted toward business, law, and ecclesiastical administration rather than the laboratory sciences, but the historical pattern (six earned-PhD or comparable scientist-apostles across roughly a century) is substantial for a religious tradition's senior leadership.

Demographics: the education-attendance correlation

In nearly every religious tradition globally, higher education correlates with lower religious participation. This is one of the most robust findings in the sociology of religion. Among Latter-day Saints, the pattern reverses.

Tim B. Heaton (BYU sociologist) and Stan L. Albrecht analyzed General Social Surveys data on Latter-day Saint educational attainment and church attendance. The data show:

LDS males with post-high-school education: 53.5% (versus 36.5% for U.S. males overall)
LDS females with post-high-school education: 44.3% (versus 27.7% for U.S. females overall)^[14:1]

Latter-day Saints are more educated than the American baseline, not less. The remarkable finding — the one that breaks the secular sociological consensus — is the attendance pattern:

"With higher levels of education come higher levels of Church activity… The correlation is startling, with Church attendance rates reaching 70 to 80 percent of those with sixteen years (or more) of education."^[14:2]

The Pew Religious Landscape Study confirms the directional finding: Latter-day Saints with college degrees attend church more frequently than those without — the inverse of the pattern observed in nearly every other American religious tradition.^[71] Wootton's Saints and Scientists survey found that 88% of LDS scientists (94 of 107) self-identified as church-active.^[72]

Left panel: Latter-day Saints attend post-high-school education at substantially higher rates than the U.S. baseline for both sexes. Right panel: among Latter-day Saints, church attendance rises with years of schooling — anchored at 70–80 percent for those with sixteen-plus years — while the typical American pattern moves the other direction. The reverse slope is the diagnostic finding: an anti-intellectual tradition would not show this curve.

This is diagnostic, not anecdotal. The CES Letter's implicit thesis is that the Church discourages education and inquiry and that thoughtful members eventually leave. If that thesis were true, attendance among educated members would collapse. It does not. It rises. The LDS pattern reverses because something about the framework engages the educated mind rather than threatening it.

The post-2007 transparency turn

The strongest evidence that the spirit of the older anti-intellectualism critique landed is the Church's own institutional course-correction over the past fifteen to twenty years. The Church essentially conceded that the older closed-records pattern was a problem and built the most aggressive transparency apparatus of any major American religion to address it.

Steven E. Snow served as Church Historian and Recorder from 2012 to 2019. His 2013 Religious Educator interview — "Start with Faith: A Conversation with Elder Steven E. Snow" — is the public articulation of the institutional pivot:

"I think in the past there was a tendency to keep a lot of the records closed or at least not give access to information. But the world has changed in the last generation — with the access to information on the Internet, we can't continue that pattern; I think we need to continue to be more open. I think being open about our history solves a whole lot more problems than it creates. We might not have all the answers, but if we are open and we are honest with ourselves and our history, I think it will pay dividends in the long run."^[21:2]

The Maxwell Institute's curated excerpts of the Snow interview emphasize the same point.^[73] Peggy Fletcher Stack's 2019 Salt Lake Tribune retrospective documents Snow's tenure as the most public-facing Church Historian in living memory.^[74] This is the official Church position now: openness pays dividends.

The Gospel Topics Essays (2013–2015) are the substantive output of that pivot. Thirteen unprecedented essays on the Church's hardest historical and doctrinal topics, published on the Church's official website under the Church's own seal:^[52:1]

"Race and the Priesthood" — the disavowal of the priesthood-temple ban's prior justifications (cross-link to Priesthood and Temple Ban for the fuller treatment)
"Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo" — engaging the polyandry, the early plural marriages, the asymmetry with Emma Smith
"Plural Marriage and Families in Early Utah" — engaging the post-1852 public practice
"Book of Mormon Translation" — acknowledging the seer stone in the hat^[24:2]
"Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham" — engaging the papyrus mismatch
"First Vision Accounts" — acknowledging the multiple accounts and engaging their differences^[25:2]
Other essays on becoming-like-God, mother-in-heaven, peace-and-violence, and similar difficult topics

These addressed exactly the topics the CES Letter weaponizes — and were published before the CES Letter (which appeared 2013, with a 2017 update). A genuinely closed institution does not publish "Race and the Priesthood." The very existence of these essays is the institutional answer to the censorship charge.

The combined institutional output represents the most aggressive transparency turn of any major American religion in the past generation:

Project	Years	What it produces
Joseph Smith Papers	2001–2023	27 volumes, 7.45M words primary-source documents at NARA standards
Gospel Topics Essays	2013–2015	13 essays addressing the hardest historical/doctrinal topics
Maxwell Institute restructuring	2012–present	Restructured toward more rigorous academic peer-review
Saints multivolume narrative	2018–2024	4-volume narrative history written for general audiences
Snow tenure as Church Historian	2012–2019	Public articulation of the openness commitment
Church History Topics page on Organic Evolution	2016	Public statement that "the Church has no official position"

Runnells's anti-intellectualism subsection cites Cook 2012, Uchtdorf 2013, and Andersen 2014 — three General Conference addresses across the same window in which the Joseph Smith Papers, the Gospel Topics Essays, and the Maxwell Institute restructuring were unfolding. The three conference talks are real; so is the publication of the Gospel Topics Essays at the Church's own website during the same months. Runnells could have engaged the institutional output and chose instead to engage only the conference quotes. The selection is the point.

The strongest critical response to the post-2007 transparency turn is that it post-dates 1981, 1985, 1993 — the period of the Mantle talk, the Oaks 1985 address, and the September Six. Doesn't this concede that 1981–2005 represented a fundamentally different institutional posture?

The honest answer is: yes, the institutional culture did shift, the shift was substantive, and the shift was driven (per Snow's own framing) by the unsustainability of the older closed-records approach in an internet age. Snow says this explicitly: "the world has changed in the last generation."^[21:3] That is a real concession. But a tradition's response to changed circumstances is itself evidence of intellectual seriousness, not its opposite. The Catholic Church's aggiornamento of Vatican II is the obvious comparison: institutional self-correction is not a confession that the prior posture was permanently correct. It is what a living tradition looks like.

Worth Acknowledging

The post-2007 transparency turn is a concession that the older critique landed. The institution recognized — through Steven Snow's 2013 framing, the launch of the Joseph Smith Papers in 2008, the Gospel Topics Essays in 2013–2015, the Maxwell Institute's 2012 restructuring, and the Saints multivolume narrative — that the older closed-records posture was a problem that needed substantive institutional response. The faithful response cannot pretend the post-2007 output is the Church's eternal posture. The honest framing is that the Church recognized a problem in the older institutional culture, said so publicly through its Church Historian, and built the most aggressive transparency infrastructure of any major American religion in response. That recognition is itself evidence of the institution's intellectual seriousness — a self-correcting tradition is more credible, not less, than one that pretends never to have erred.

Comparative context

Anti-intellectualism is not unique to Mormonism, and the Latter-day Saint tradition compares favorably across several dimensions when held next to other religious bodies of comparable size or older provenance.

The Catholic Church condemned Galileo in 1633 for his heliocentric writings and did not formally rehabilitate him until Pope John Paul II's 1992 statement — a 359-year delay. The Index Librorum Prohibitorum (the Index of Forbidden Books) was not abolished until 1966; it had been maintained continuously since 1559. Many evangelical Protestant denominations remain officially committed to Young Earth Creationism and biblical inerrancy. The Latter-day Saint tradition has no required position on the age of the earth and no required position on biological evolution; BYU has taught evolution since 1971.^[75] The 1931 First Presidency memorandum directed General Authorities to "leave Geology, Biology, Archaeology and Anthropology, no one of which has to do with the salvation of the souls of mankind, to scientific research." The 2016 Church History Topics page on "Organic Evolution" states: "The Church has no official position on the theory of evolution. Organic evolution… is a matter for scientific study."^[76]

The doctrine-vs-opinion framework, continuing revelation, and the "all truth" principle are structural advantages other traditions do not possess. The tradition distinguishes between binding doctrine (canonized scripture, official First Presidency declarations) and individual leader opinion (general authority sermons, personal correspondence, devotional addresses). This framework permits the institution to subsequently clarify, refine, or quietly retract a particular formulation without triggering a doctrinal crisis. The 1945 Ward Teachers' Message episode is the paradigm case: an unauthorized publication was issued, the prophet repudiated the formulation in writing, and members' personal responsibility for thinking was reaffirmed.

What the CES Letter omits

A representative list, mapping back to the assertions in Runnells's anti-intellectualism subsection:

Audience and context for the Mantle talk — CES seminary teachers, not professional historians; the illustrative example Packer used about decontextualized presentation; the qualifying clauses ("delights in," "employed specifically to build faith").^[3:7]
George Albert Smith's December 7, 1945 letter to J. Raymond Cope — the only direct First Presidency statement on "the thinking has been done," running directly against the CES Letter's framing.^[16:3]
Albert E. Bowen's 1946 attribution — identifying the 1945 Ward Teachers' Message as the work of an unauthorized clerk.^[29:2]
Davis Bitton's 2001 FARMS Review revisit — the 35-year-later both/and reframing.^[11:5]
The Joseph Smith Papers — twenty-seven volumes, 7.45 million words, National-Archives-endorsed, completed 2023.^[13:4]^[65:2]
The Gospel Topics Essays — 13 essays addressing exactly the topics the CES Letter says the Church suppresses, published before the CES Letter.^[52:2]^[24:3]^[25:3]^[26:2]
Hugh B. Brown's 1969 "Eternal Quest" — a First Presidency member at BYU explicitly endorsing intellectual freedom and saying the Church does not care whether students' thoughts are orthodox or heterodox so long as they have thoughts.^[15:5]
The education-attendance correlation — Latter-day Saints with college degrees attend at higher rates than those without; the inverse of nearly every other American religious tradition.^[14:3]^[71:1]
Bushman's actual position — a critique of correlation-era public packaging, not loss of faith. Bushman's observation and Runnells's observation about the gap between correlation packaging and the documented record are the same observation; Bushman and Runnells differ in the conclusions drawn from it.^[42:3]^[41:1]
Three of six rebaptisms — Gileadi (1996), Hanks (2012), Anderson posthumous (2024).^[51:2]^[50:2]^[46:2]
The differing nature of the six cases — Toscano on rhetoric, Whitesides disfellowshipped, Gileadi on Isaiah scholarship reversed within three years, Hanks restored 2012, Anderson restored 2024, Quinn the most prolific historian and the most contested case.
The post-2007 transparency turn — Snow's 2013 pivot, the Joseph Smith Papers launch, the Gospel Topics Essays, the Saints multivolume narrative.^[21:4]
The internal/leaked nature of the May 1993 Packer talk — not a published sermon, but an internal address to the All-Church Coordinating Council.^[45:2]
Joseph Smith's own words on intellectual freedom — "All have the privilege of thinking for themselves upon all matters relative to conscience" (January 22, 1834 letter to the elders); James Talmage's Vitality of Mormonism (1919) on members not being "irresponsible automatons"; D&C 88:118 on "study and faith."^[67:1]^[66:2]^[17:2]

The "1984/North Korea" comparison the CES Letter culminates in^[2:1] requires omitting all fourteen of these data points. Restored, the comparison fails as a category of analysis.

Concrete questions a serious skeptical reader will press

These are the questions a reader who has read Mason 2023, Bitton 2001, and Bushman's published work — not just the CES Letter — will press.

Was Quinn delighting in Packer's sense, or doing serious work Packer couldn't tolerate? Quinn's earlier scholarly work — the J. Reuben Clark biography, the Phi Alpha Theta lecture, the magic-world-view research — reads as careful documentary historical work, not gleeful tearing-down.^[47:2] By the "delights" standard, Quinn's pre-discipline work doesn't qualify. The honest answer: Quinn was excommunicated as a serious historian doing serious work, in a period when the institution had limited tolerance for the implications of that work for some sensitive topics.

Was Benson wrong about "Fourteen Fundamentals"? The talk overstated; Spencer W. Kimball had concerns; the talk has not been canonized; and the broader canon and tradition (D&C 88:118, Joseph Smith's January 1834 letter, Hugh B. Brown 1969) sustains a different conscience-and-canon balance. Yet the doctrine-vs-opinion framework does not cleanly absorb a statement whose formulations have been repeatedly reaffirmed across one apostle's nine-year presidency and his successors' administrations. The deeper tension is properly the subject of the Prophets section.^[20:4]^[36:2]

Doesn't the post-2007 institutional output concede the 1993–2005 critique? Yes, partially. The institutional culture did shift, the shift was substantive, and the shift was driven (per Snow's framing) by the unsustainability of the older closed-records posture in an internet age. A tradition that responds to changed circumstances is acting like a living tradition.^[21:5]

Bushman — what did he actually mean? A critique of correlation-era simplifications, not the truth claims themselves. Bushman's underlying observation about the gap between correlation packaging and the documented record is the same observation Runnells is making. Where they differ is in conclusions: Bushman concludes the truth claims survive the documented complications; Runnells concludes they do not.^[42:4]^[41:2]

The September Six rebaptisms — do they fully resolve the harm? Three of six were ultimately restored — real institutional reconsideration. But the documented record sets limits on how complete that recovery is: Mason names Quinn's lack of full-time faculty employment in connection with the 2011 Hunter Chair search; the broader biographical record extends the diagnosis to Anderson (never reintegrated into faithful institutional scholarly life) and Toscano (career trajectory diverged permanently); Mason emphasizes that the absence of certain critical perspectives in current LDS scholarship is itself a continuing cost. Institutional reconsideration is evidence of integrity but does not erase the damage done in the interim.^[10:6]

Why does the CES Letter cite quotes from leaders rather than from the canon? Because the canon (D&C 88:118; D&C 93:36; AoF 1:13) cuts directly against the anti-intellectualism thesis.^[17:3]^[18:2]^[56:1]

The Book of Mormon as anchor

When the topic gets genuinely hard, what stands firm is the Book of Mormon. The CES Letter's anti-intellectualism case raises questions about a few load-bearing leader quotes, an episode of disciplinary action thirty-plus years ago, and an institutional monitoring committee. Even granting the strongest critical reading of all of them, the Book of Mormon's existence remains the deepest piece of evidence for the truth claims of the Restoration.

The book was produced in approximately sixty working days of dictation between April and June 1829, with no preliminary drafts, no whistleblowers from the small circle who watched the dictation process, no extant source material identified by sustained scholarly investigation, and no naturalistic explanation that survives close examination.^[77] The text contains Hebraisms (chiastic structures, Semitic word patterns, ancient legal forms), Old World cultural elements (covenant theology, ancient Near Eastern narrative typologies, deeply intertextual reading of Isaiah), and structural-thematic coherence across more than 270,000 words that Joseph Smith — a 23-year-old farmer with limited formal education — could not plausibly have invented in two months of dictation.

The CES Letter does not seriously engage how the Book of Mormon came to exist. It quotes Bushman's "dominant narrative is not true" line — out of context, from a 2016 fireside Q&A — as though Bushman were repudiating the Book of Mormon's authenticity.^[1:10] He was not. Bushman is a believing Latter-day Saint, a temple-recommend-holding patriarch, and the author of Rough Stone Rolling. His "dominant narrative" comment was a methodological observation about how Church history had been told, not a denial of the events themselves.^[41:3]^[42:5] The detailed positive case for the Book of Mormon — chiasmus, Hebraisms, the textual-archaeological case at Nahom in southern Arabia, ancient Near Eastern parallels in 1 and 2 Nephi, the witness accounts — is developed in the Book of Mormon section of this site and is not relitigated here.

What matters for the anti-intellectualism question is this: the Book of Mormon is not a document an anti-intellectual tradition would produce. It is a document that requires sustained scholarly engagement to read carefully — twenty-seven volumes of the Joseph Smith Papers; sixty-plus years of BYU Studies Quarterly; the entire Maxwell Institute / Interpreter / Scripture Central infrastructure; Royal Skousen's twenty-five-year Critical Text Project; Grant Hardy's Oxford-published Annotated Book of Mormon (2023). These are the kinds of artifacts a tradition produces when it takes its founding text seriously enough to subject it to multi-decade scholarly scrutiny. They are the inverse of what an anti-intellectual tradition produces.

Assessment

The CES Letter's anti-intellectualism case is structurally a quote tableau. Restore the original audiences, dates, and surrounding paragraphs to the eight or nine load-bearing quotes, and the case shrinks dramatically — but does not vanish. The September Six chilling effect on Mormon studies between 1993 and roughly 2005 is real and faithfully documented by Mason 2023, who names scars that persist.^[10:7] The 1981 "Mantle" talk's downstream effects, whatever Packer's intent, gave cover to local leaders who used the language to discourage legitimate questions. Packer's May 1993 "three enemies" framing is indefensible as a description of legitimate scholarship. Benson's 1980 "Fourteen Fundamentals" stated formulations that sit in tension with the doctrine-vs-opinion framework faithful apologetics deploys when historical statements become embarrassing — and the talk's continued reaffirmation by senior leaders since complicates the apologetic resolution. The Strengthening Church Members Committee exists; institutional monitoring of members' public speech, even when narrower than the CES Letter implies, deserves engagement rather than deflection. The post-2007 transparency turn is, by its own framing through Steven Snow, a concession that the older institutional posture had become unsustainable.^[21:6]

What the case does not do is fail entirely. The honest faithful position acknowledges all of these. What the CES Letter cannot honestly do is omit the rest of the record while presenting its quote tableau as the Church's position on inquiry. The Church operates four universities and enrolls approximately a million students worldwide.^[12:2] The Joseph Smith Papers Project is one of the most ambitious documentary editing projects in American religious history.^[13:5]^[65:3] Latter-day Saint members with college degrees attend at higher rates than those without — the inverse of the pattern in nearly every other American religious tradition.^[14:4]^[71:2] First Presidency member Hugh B. Brown told BYU students in 1969 that the Church does not care whether their thoughts are orthodox or heterodox so long as they have thoughts.^[15:6] President George Albert Smith repudiated "the thinking has been done" as "grossly to misrepresent the true ideal of the Church."^[16:4] Davis Bitton — the historian who introduced the "anti-intellectualism in Mormon history" framing in 1966 — revisited his own thesis in 2001 and called it "selective" and "a caricature."^[11:6] Canonized scripture commands members to "seek learning, even by study and also by faith," names "intelligence" as the glory of God, and rewards knowledge eternally.^[17:4]^[18:3]^[19:2]

The tradition is both/and, not either/or — exactly as Bitton settled into in 2001. There are real anti-intellectual strands within it; there are also institutional commitments to scholarship that dwarf those strands. The faithful position that survives the strongest critical case is the position Bitton landed at: anti-intellectual currents exist; they are not the dominant pattern; the institutional reality, the canonized scriptural commitments, and the post-2007 transparency turn together establish that the broader tradition is fundamentally pro-intellectual. And when the topic does turn genuinely hard, what stands firm at the foundation is the Book of Mormon — a 270,000-word text dictated in roughly 60 working days, witnessed by scribes whose accounts held for the rest of their lives, and engaged across multiple decades by the very scholarly infrastructure that an anti-intellectual tradition would not produce.

Bottom line: The CES Letter's anti-intellectualism case requires omitting the institutional record — four universities, the Joseph Smith Papers (27 volumes, 7.45M words at NARA standards), the Gospel Topics Essays, scripture declaring "the glory of God is intelligence," and a college-educated-attend-more pattern that inverts the secular sociological consensus. The honest both/and version (Mason 2023 / Bitton 2001 / Bushman's actual position) concedes the chilling effect, the Mantle talk's downstream costs, the SCMC's structural awkwardness, and the post-2007 transparency turn as real concessions — and still locates the Latter-day Saint tradition as fundamentally pro-intellectual.

Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Other Concerns," pp. 120–125. The anti-intellectualism subsection cites Boyd K. Packer's "The Mantle is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect" (1981), Dallin H. Oaks's 1985 CES Symposium "Reading Church History" address and 2007 PBS interview, Quentin L. Cook's October 2012 General Conference, Dieter F. Uchtdorf's January 2013 CES devotional and October 2013 General Conference, Neil L. Andersen's October 2014 General Conference, N. Eldon Tanner's August 1979 Ensign "The Debate Is Over" First Presidency Message, the September Six (September 1993), the Strengthening Church Members Committee (1985), Boyd K. Packer's May 18, 1993 All-Church Coordinating Council address, and Richard Bushman's "the dominant narrative is not true" line (cover and p. 124). ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Other Concerns," p. 125. Runnells writes: "Some things that are true are not very useful + Censorship + Deceptively altering past quotes + Prioritizing tithing before food and shelter + It is wrong to criticize leaders of the Church, even if the criticism is true + Spying and monitoring on members + Intellectuals are dangerous + 'us versus them' rhetoric + When the prophet speaks the debate is over + Obedience is the First Law of Heaven = 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." ↩︎ ↩︎
Boyd K. Packer, "The Mantle is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect," address to the Fifth Annual Church Educational System Symposium on the Doctrine and Covenants and Church History, BYU, August 22, 1981. Reprinted in Teaching Seminary Preservice Readings, Religion 370, 471, 475 (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, official seminary preservice manual). https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/teaching-seminary-preservice-readings-religion-370-471-and-475/the-mantle-is-far-far-greater-than-the-intellect ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Boyd K. Packer, "The Mantle is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect," BYU Studies 21, no. 3 (1981): 259–278. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol21/iss3/2/. The same talk also at Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/TheMantleIsFarFarGreaterThanTheIntellect. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Dallin H. Oaks, full long-form interview transcript for The Mormons, PBS American Experience / Frontline documentary, broadcast April 2007, Helen Whitney director. The first sentence of Oaks's quoted passage ("It's wrong to criticize leaders of the church, even if the criticism is true") appears in the broadcast script transcript at https://www.pbs.org/mormons/etc/script2.html; the extended passage including the contempt-of-court parallel comes from the longer interview transcript published by PBS at https://www.pbs.org/mormons/interviews/oaks.html. The full passage is reproduced consistently across faithful and critical sources from the long-form transcript. ↩︎ ↩︎
Dallin H. Oaks, "Reading Church History," address to the Eighth Annual Church Educational System Symposium on the Doctrine and Covenants and Church History, BYU, August 16, 1985. Internet Archive scan of full 27-page transcript: https://archive.org/details/reading_church_history_1985_oaks. YouTube audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hAL-qLOISs. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
N. Eldon Tanner, "The Debate Is Over," First Presidency Message, Ensign, August 1979. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1979/08/the-debate-is-over. Tanner attributes the phrase to Elaine Cannon's November 1978 fireside (per Ensign November 1978, p. 108). ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
"September Six," Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_Six. Six members of the Church were excommunicated or disfellowshipped in September 1993: Lavina Fielding Anderson, D. Michael Quinn, Paul Toscano, Maxine Hanks, Lynne Kanavel Whitesides, and Avraham Gileadi. ↩︎
Jeffrey R. Holland, interview in The Mormon Candidate, BBC This World documentary, March 2012, John Sweeney reporting. Holland confirmed the existence of the Strengthening Church Members Committee and described it as "born some years ago to protect against predatory practices of polygamists" and "primarily there to guard against polygamy"; Holland also stated he was "not on that committee" and did not "know much about it." See FAIR's documentation, "Strengthening Church Members Committee," https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Mormonism_and_Church_discipline/Strengthening_Church_Members_Committee. ↩︎ ↩︎
Patrick Q. Mason, "The September Six and the Lost Generation of Mormon Studies," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 56, no. 3 (Fall 2023). https://www.dialoguejournal.com/articles/the-september-six-and-the-lost-generation-of-mormon-studies/. Mason holds the Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University (since July 2019); previously held the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University (2011–2018); PhD in history from the University of Notre Dame (2005); BA from BYU (1999); faithful Latter-day Saint. Mason argues the chilling effect was real, that the recovery is partial and uneven, that scars persist, and that the absence of certain critical perspectives in current LDS scholarship is a continuing cost of the 1993–2005 period. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Davis Bitton, "Mormon Anti-Intellectualism: A Reply," FARMS Review 13, no. 2 (2001): 59–62. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/msr/vol13/iss2/8/. Bitton was Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Utah and former Assistant Church Historian (1972–1982). ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
"The Growth and Momentum of the Church Educational System," Church Newsroom, September 25, 2023. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/growth-momentum-church-educational-system. 2023–2024 figures: 427,642 seminary students; 384,095 institute students; 117,204 in BYU / BYU-Idaho / BYU-Hawaii / Ensign College combined; approximately 70,000 in BYU-Pathway Worldwide across 180+ countries. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
"Final Volume of Joseph Smith Papers Published, Completing Monumental Historical Work," Church Historian's Press, June 27, 2023. https://www.churchhistorianspress.org/news/final-volume-of-joseph-smith-papers-published-completing-monumental-historical-work. Final-volume statistics: 27 volumes, 18,822 pages, 7,452,072 words, 49,687 footnotes, 1,306 journal entries, 643 letters, 155 revelations. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Tim B. Heaton and Stan L. Albrecht, "The Consequential Dimension of Mormon Religiosity," in Tim B. Heaton, Stephen J. Bahr, and Cardell K. Jacobson, eds., Latter-day Saint Social Life: Social Research on the LDS Church and Its Members (Provo, UT: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1998). https://rsc.byu.edu/book/latter-day-saint-social-life. Heaton is a BYU sociologist who has analyzed General Social Surveys data on Latter-day Saint educational attainment and church attendance. Statistics: LDS males with post-HS education at 53.5% (vs. 36.5% U.S. males overall); LDS females with post-HS education at 44.3% (vs. 27.7% U.S. females overall); attendance rates reaching 70 to 80 percent among Latter-day Saints with sixteen years (or more) of education. See also BYU's accessible summary: "BYU study links education to religious involvement," BYU Daily Universe, February 10, 2015, https://universe.byu.edu/2015/02/10/byu-study-links-education-to-religious-involvement/, and FAIR's "Education, Scholarship, and Mormonism," https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/archive/publications/education-scholarship-and-mormonism. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Hugh B. Brown, "An Eternal Quest — Freedom of the Mind," BYU devotional address, May 13, 1969. https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/hugh-b-brown/eternal-quest/. Brown was First Counselor in the David O. McKay First Presidency at the time. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
George Albert Smith, letter to J. Raymond Cope (minister, First Unitarian Society of Salt Lake City), December 7, 1945. Reproduced in full in "When the Prophet Speaks, Is the Thinking Done?", FAIR, https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/archive/publications/when-the-prophet-speaks-is-the-thinking-done. The letter responds to Cope's concern about the June 1945 Ward Teachers' Message published in Improvement Era 48, no. 6 (June 1945): 354. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 88:118. "Seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith." ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 93:36. "The glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth." ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 130:18–19. "Whatever principle of intelligence we attain unto in this life, it will rise with us in the resurrection. And if a person gains more knowledge and intelligence in this life through his diligence and obedience than another, he will have so much the advantage in the world to come." ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Ezra Taft Benson, "Fourteen Fundamentals in Following the Prophet," BYU devotional address, February 26, 1980. https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/ezra-taft-benson/fourteen-fundamentals-following-prophet/. Benson was a member of the Quorum of the Twelve at the time; he became Church President in November 1985. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Steven E. Snow (Church Historian and Recorder, 2012–2019), "Start with Faith: A Conversation with Elder Steven E. Snow," interview in The Religious Educator 14, no. 3 (2013). https://rsc.byu.edu/vol-14-no-3-2013/start-faith-conversation-elder-steven-e-snow. The pivot quote: "Being open about our history solves a whole lot more problems than it creates." ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
D. Michael Quinn, "On Being a Mormon Historian," Phi Alpha Theta lecture, BYU, December 4, 1981. BYU Special Collections finding aid: http://archives.lib.byu.edu/repositories/14/archival_objects/258408. Quinn's direct response to Packer's August 22, 1981 "Mantle" address. The lecture circulated in samizdat for years before publication. ↩︎
Mormon Alliance Case Reports, ed. Lavina Fielding Anderson and Janice Merrill Allred (Salt Lake City: Mormon Alliance, 1996). https://mormon-alliance.org/casereports/volume2/v2.htm. Volume 2 collects disciplinary-case documentation in primary form, including the September Six cases and the broader pattern of leadership-intellectual conflicts. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
"Book of Mormon Translation," Gospel Topics Essays, 2013. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/book-of-mormon-translation. Acknowledges the seer-stone-in-hat translation method. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
"First Vision Accounts," Gospel Topics Essays, 2013. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/first-vision-accounts. Acknowledges the multiple First Vision accounts and engages their differences. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
"Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo," Gospel Topics Essays, 2014. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/plural-marriage-in-kirtland-and-nauvoo. Acknowledges the polyandry and the asymmetry between Joseph Smith's plural marriages and Emma Smith's awareness of them. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Dallin H. Oaks and Marvin S. Hill, Carthage Conspiracy: The Trial of the Accused Assassins of Joseph Smith (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975). Oaks's published scholarly historical work, undertaken before his apostolic call. ↩︎
"Sustaining the General Authorities of the Church," Ward Teachers' Message, Improvement Era 48, no. 6 (June 1945): 354. Distributed to all wards as a script for monthly visiting-priesthood (ward teaching) lessons. Reproduced in full in the FAIR archived publication: https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/archive/publications/when-the-prophet-speaks-is-the-thinking-done. ↩︎
Albert E. Bowen (then of the Quorum of the Twelve), letter to Dean Brimhall (sociologist, University of Utah), 1946. Bowen identified the Improvement Era June 1945 Ward Teachers' Message as having been written by an unnamed clerk in the Presiding Bishop's office and distributed without an authorizing review by the General Authorities. See FAIR, "When the Prophet Speaks, Is the Thinking Done?", https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/archive/publications/when-the-prophet-speaks-is-the-thinking-done. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Quentin L. Cook, "Can Ye Feel So Now?", October 2012 General Conference. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2012/10/can-ye-feel-so-now. Includes the "magnify, exaggerate, and, in some cases, invent" passage. ↩︎
Richard E. Turley Jr., Victims: The LDS Church and the Mark Hofmann Case (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Linda Sillitoe and Allen Roberts, Salamander: The Story of the Mormon Forgery Murders, 2nd ed. (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1989). The Mark Hofmann forgeries (the "Salamander Letter" and other fabricated documents) were accepted as authentic by faithful and critical scholars alike for several years before exposure following the October 1985 bombings in Salt Lake City. ↩︎ ↩︎
Dieter F. Uchtdorf, "What Is Truth?", BYU CES Devotional address, January 13, 2013. https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/dieter-f-uchtdorf/what-is-truth/. Includes the flat-earth/hologram passage as an illustrative example of the broader epistemic point that frequent repetition is not evidence. ↩︎ ↩︎
Dieter F. Uchtdorf, "Come, Join with Us," October 2013 General Conference. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2013/10/come-join-with-us. Includes the "doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith" passage and the surrounding paragraphs on honest inquiry, agency, and the candid acknowledgment that "there have been times when members or leaders in the Church have simply made mistakes." ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
The functional pattern in this kind of framing — acknowledge questions exist → reframe questions as a phase to pass through → arrive at testimony — is honest as far as Uchtdorf's own language goes, and the surrounding paragraphs that affirm honest search do most of the steelman's work. But the asymmetry that troubles careful readers is less in Uchtdorf's text than in how the formulation has been deployed afterward by some local leaders and informal Church culture: when someone wrestles with specific issues and concludes against the official position, "doubt your doubts" can be heard as implying that the conclusion proves the search was insufficient. That implication is not what Uchtdorf says. But the stakes attached to "honest" search — local leadership response, family relationships, community standing — are heavy enough that the asymmetry deserves to be named rather than waved past. ↩︎
Neil L. Andersen, "Joseph Smith," October 2014 General Conference. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2014/10/joseph-smith. Includes the "Internet information does not have a 'truth' filter" passage; surrounding paragraphs reference the Mark Hofmann forgeries. ↩︎ ↩︎
Edward L. Kimball, Lengthen Your Stride: The Presidency of Spencer W. Kimball (Provo, Utah: BYU Studies, 2005). Documents Spencer W. Kimball's reported response to the February 1980 Benson devotional, including the report that Kimball called Benson in to discuss the talk. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1994); see also The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1997). Quinn's reporting on the Kimball-Benson exchange following the February 1980 devotional. ↩︎
Gregory A. Prince and William Robert Wright, David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2005). Documents Spencer W. Kimball's pro-thoughtful-inquiry posture and contextualizes Kimball's reaction to the 1980 Benson address. ↩︎
Claudio R. M. Costa, "Obedience to the Prophets," October 2010 General Conference, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2010/10/obedience-to-the-prophets; Kevin R. Duncan, "Our Very Survival," October 2010 General Conference, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2010/10/our-very-survival. Both speakers were members of the Seventy at the time. Costa's address quotes eight of Benson's fourteen fundamentals verbatim, including "the living prophet is more vital to us than the standard works" and "the prophet will never lead the Church astray." Duncan's address draws on the same Benson framework on prophetic authority. ↩︎
The functional currency of the 1980 "Fourteen Fundamentals" talk in subsequent Church teaching is the part of the question the apologetic framework does not cleanly absorb. The talk has been reprinted in Church-published instructional materials. The "Benson was just one apostle" defense weakens the longer its formulations are reaffirmed in subsequent General Conferences. The doctrine-vs-opinion distinction does real work for isolated apostolic statements subsequently not reaffirmed; it does considerably less work when the statement is repeatedly reaffirmed verbatim from a General Conference pulpit thirty years after delivery. ↩︎
Richard Lyman Bushman, Q&A response at a fireside held at the home of Mark England, June 12, 2016. The "the dominant narrative is not true; it can't be sustained" line was given in response to a question about how Church members should approach disorienting historical complications. The recording circulated online; the date and venue are documented in critic-side and faithful sources alike. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Richard Lyman Bushman, "Conversations with Mormon Historians," Religious Educator interview, BYU Religious Studies Center. https://rsc.byu.edu/conversations-mormon-historians/richard-lyman-bushman. Asked whether his historical research had shaken his faith in Joseph Smith, Bushman answered: "Time after time people ask me, 'Did you find anything in your researches that shook your faith in Joseph Smith?' I can truthfully answer these uneasy people no." Bushman frames the dominant-narrative critique as a methodological observation about correlation-era simplification rather than a loss-of-faith claim. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Trent Toone, "How Richard Bushman became 'one of the LDS Church's premier historians,'" Deseret News, September 22, 2023. https://www.deseret.com/2023/9/22/23839837/richard-bushman-mormon-historian/. Profile coverage in which Bushman's career-long historical research is described as not having "changed Bushman's mind about believing Joseph Smith was a visionary and a prophet." ↩︎
Richard L. Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Knopf, 2005). Bushman's most extensive published treatment of Joseph Smith's life and the Restoration; remains the standard faithful biography. Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/josephsmithbegin00bush. ↩︎
Boyd K. Packer, address to the All-Church Coordinating Council, May 18, 1993. The talk was an internal address to a regular meeting of correlation department heads and General Authorities. The transcript was leaked rather than published; it has been widely reproduced on critical-side sites and the relevant text is referenced in faithful sources with caveats about its leaked status. Runnells cites the talk in CES Letter (2017), "Other Concerns," p. 124. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Peggy Fletcher Stack, "Writer excommunicated during LDS Church's 'September Six' purge is 'rebaptized' — with a twist," Salt Lake Tribune, November 21, 2024. https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2024/11/21/september-six-writer-readmitted/. Anderson died October 29, 2023, having continued attending her ward faithfully for approximately thirty years after her September 1993 excommunication. Her membership was restored posthumously in November 2024. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
D. Michael Quinn, "Background and Fallout," Sunstone retrospective. https://sunstone.org/background-and-fallout/. Quinn's own retrospective on the events leading to the August 22, 1985 Packer/Oaks letters and his eventual September 1993 excommunication. See also Quinn's substantial published scholarly output: J. Reuben Clark: The Church Years (1983), Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (1987, rev. 1998), The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power (1994), Same-Sex Dynamics Among Nineteenth-Century Americans: A Mormon Example (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1996), Elder Statesman: A Biography of J. Reuben Clark (2002). ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
"D. Michael Quinn," FAIR, https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Mormonism_and_Church_discipline/Scholars/D._Michael_Quinn. Provides the disciplinary letter context, Quinn's refusal to attend, and the disciplinary council's stated reasons (Quinn's public statements regarding the priesthood for women). ↩︎
The literal-trigger-of-discipline question (what specifically was cited in Quinn's disciplinary letter) is real but does not settle the deeper one. Quinn's published scholarly work on post-Manifesto polygamy and the magic-world-view research was, at minimum, the background condition under which the discipline occurred even if not the literal trigger. The faithful response should own this rather than balanced-treatment-everyone-has-a-point. ↩︎
Peggy Fletcher Stack, "Maxine Hanks, One of the 'September Six,' Rebaptized into LDS Church," Salt Lake Tribune, February 3, 2012. Hanks was the editor of Women and Authority: Re-emerging Mormon Feminism (1992), excommunicated in September 1993, and rebaptized in February 2012. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Wendy Cope Mickleson, "Scholar Rebaptized into LDS Church," Deseret News, March 8, 1996. https://www.deseret.com/1996/3/8/19229461/scholar-rebaptized-into-lds-church/. Avraham Gileadi was rebaptized approximately three years after his September 1993 excommunication. Gileadi's quoted reflection in the Deseret News coverage: "In my heart I've never felt like I've had an apostate spirit." ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
"Gospel Topics Essays," The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays. Thirteen essays addressing the Church's hardest historical and doctrinal topics, published 2013–2015, available on the Church's official website. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
"Strengthening Church Members Committee," FAIR, https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Mormonism_and_Church_discipline/Strengthening_Church_Members_Committee. Documents the committee's formation during Ezra Taft Benson's presidency (Benson became Church President in November 1985), the 1991 public discovery via a leaked 1990 Glen L. Pace memo, Holland's March 2012 BBC acknowledgment, the polygamist-offshoots framing, and the scriptural basis (D&C 123) cited by FAIR for the committee's record-keeping mandate. Pace was Second Counselor in the Presiding Bishopric 1985–1989, then a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy 1992–2010. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Davis Bitton, "Anti-Intellectualism in Mormon History," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 1, no. 3 (Fall 1966): 111–134. https://www.dialoguejournal.com/articles/anti-intellectualism-in-mormon-history/. Bitton was a young historian when the article was published; he later served as Assistant Church Historian under Leonard Arrington from 1972 to 1982. ↩︎
James B. Allen, "Anti-Intellectualism in Mormon History: Thoughts on Anti-Intellectualism: A Response," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 1, no. 3 (Fall 1966). https://www.dialoguejournal.com/articles/anti-intellectualism-in-mormon-history-thoughts-on-anti-intellectualism-a-response/. ↩︎
Articles of Faith 1:13. "If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things." ↩︎ ↩︎
Articles of Faith 1:9. "We believe all that God has revealed, all that He does now reveal, and we believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things." ↩︎
"Rankings," BYU News. https://news.byu.edu/rankings. BYU is ranked in the top 110 National Universities (U.S. News, 2026), No. 36 on the Forbes Top 100 list (2025), top 25 in the Wall Street Journal college rankings, No. 5 yield rate nationally at 78%, and No. 3 among doctoral research institutions for Fulbright Scholars (2023). ↩︎
"Brigham Young University - Provo Rankings," EduRank. https://edurank.org/uni/brigham-young-university-provo/rankings/. BYU's research output: more than 60,000 academic publications with over 1.6 million citations. ↩︎
BYU Studies Quarterly, founded 1959. The oldest continuously published journal devoted to Latter-day Saint scholarship. https://byustudies.byu.edu. ↩︎
The Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, Brigham Young University, https://mi.byu.edu. Successor to FARMS (Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, founded 1979); restructured beginning in 2012 (Daniel Peterson's removal as editor of the Mormon Studies Review in mid-2012). Spencer Fluhman was appointed editor of the Mormon Studies Review in March 2013 and executive director of the Maxwell Institute by 2016. Documentation at https://mi.byu.edu/mi-what-changed/. Publishes the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies and academic monographs. ↩︎
The Interpreter Foundation, https://interpreterfoundation.org. Publishes Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship — peer-reviewed, open-access, founded 2012. ↩︎ ↩︎
Scripture Central (formerly Book of Mormon Central), https://scripturecentral.org. Produces KnoWhys, evidence summaries, and a comprehensive digital archive of Latter-day Saint scholarship. ↩︎
The Joseph Smith Papers landing page, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/. About the project: https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/articles/about-the-project. The complete print and digital edition is available open-access. ↩︎
Endorsements of the Joseph Smith Papers by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (under the National Archives) and by independent academic historians. https://beta.josephsmithpapers.org/articles/endorsements. See also "Church leaders, historians reflect on Joseph Smith Papers as project nears its end," Church News, March 30, 2023. Thomas P. Slaughter (University of Rochester): "the gold standard in the field of historical documentary editing." Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (Pulitzer-winning Harvard historian): "The Church didn't want to hide anything about Joseph Smith." Laurie Maffly-Kipp (Washington University): "I would say it ranks with the best kinds of scholarly sources I've seen." ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
James E. Talmage, The Vitality of Mormonism: Brief Essays on Distinctive Doctrines (Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1919), Essay 8 ("Divine Command and Human Agency—The Church a Democracy"), p. 49. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/47182/47182-h/47182-h.htm. Talmage was a member of the Quorum of the Twelve from 1911 (called eight years before Vitality was published). The "irresponsible automatons" passage occurs within Essay 8's treatment of divine command, human agency, and the Church as a democracy. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Joseph Smith, letter to the elders of the Church in Kirtland and abroad, January 22, 1834. Published in Times and Seasons; reprinted in History of the Church 2:6–7. See also "Joseph Smith and Agency," BYU Religious Studies Center, https://rsc.byu.edu/joseph-smith-and-agency. ↩︎ ↩︎
Joseph Smith, attributed in John Taylor's Millennial Star 13:339 (15 November 1851), recorded in History of the Church 5:21–22 footnote. Cited widely in faithful sources — e.g., FAIR, "Mormonism and history," https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Mormonism_and_history. ↩︎
Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses 9:150, sermon dated January 12, 1862 ("Eternal Punishment—'Mormonism,' &c"). Brigham Young expressed concern that members might be over-trusting their leaders rather than seeking confirmation directly from God. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Journal_of_Discourses/Volume_9/Eternal_Punishment%2C_etc. ↩︎
Russell M. Nelson, remarks at the dedication of the BYU Life Sciences Building, April 9, 2015. Reported in Church News, April 14, 2015, "Elder Nelson Dedicates Life Sciences Building: 'There is no conflict between science and religion,'" https://www.thechurchnews.com/2015/4/14/23212914/elder-nelson-dedicates-life-sciences-building-there-is-no-conflict-between-science-and-religion/. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
"Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints," Pew Research Center, Religious Landscape Study. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/religious-tradition/mormon/. Latter-day Saints with college degrees attend church at higher rates than those without — the inverse of the pattern observed in nearly every other American religious tradition. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Cited in "Education, Scholarship, and Mormonism," FAIR, https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/archive/publications/education-scholarship-and-mormonism. 88% of LDS scientists (94 of 107) self-identified as church-active. ↩︎
"Truth in Church History: Excerpts from the Religious Educator's Q&A with Elder Steven Snow," Maxwell Institute. https://mi.byu.edu/truth-in-church-history-excerpts-from-the-religious-educators-qa-with-elder-steven-snow/. Curated excerpts of the Snow 2013 Religious Educator interview. ↩︎
Peggy Fletcher Stack, "LDS Church's most public-facing historian retires," Salt Lake Tribune, August 10, 2019. https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2019/08/10/lds-churchs-non/. Retrospective on Steven E. Snow's tenure as Church Historian. ↩︎
"50 Years of Teaching Evolution at BYU," BYU Life Sciences Magazine. https://lifesciences.byu.edu/magazine/50-years-of-teaching-evolution-at-byu. Course Zoology 404 / Comparative Evolutionary Theory launched fall 1971 by Dr. Clayton White and Dr. Duane Jeffery. ↩︎
"Organic Evolution," Church History Topics, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2016. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics/organic-evolution. "The Church has no official position on the theory of evolution. Organic evolution… is a matter for scientific study." ↩︎
For the timing-and-scribes positive case for the Book of Mormon, see John W. Welch, "How Long Did It Take Joseph Smith to Translate the Book of Mormon?", Ensign, January 1988; the textual evidence assembled in Royal Skousen's Critical Text of the Book of Mormon (FARMS / BYU Studies, 2001–present); and the witness accounts collected in Lyndon W. Cook, ed., David Whitmer Interviews: A Restoration Witness (Provo, Utah: Grandin, 1991). The detailed positive case for the Book of Mormon is developed elsewhere on this site. ↩︎

Anti-Intellectualism ​

Restoring the load-bearing quotes ​

Packer 1981 — "Some things that are true are not very useful" ​

The Joseph-rock-in-hat reductio ​

Oaks 1985 — "Reading Church History" ​

Oaks 2007 PBS — "wrong to criticize" ​

Tanner 1979 and the 1945 Ward Teachers' Message ​

Cook 2012, Uchtdorf 2013, Andersen 2014 — the "internet" cluster ​

Benson 1980 — "Fourteen Fundamentals in Following the Prophet" ​

Bushman's "dominant narrative" ​

The September Six and the documented chilling effect ​

The six names and their cases ​

What the chilling effect actually was ​

Packer's May 1993 "three enemies" ​

The Strengthening Church Members Committee ​

Davis Bitton 1966 and 2001 ​

The institutional positive case ​

Doctrine ​

Institutions ​

Prophetic counsel ​

The apostle-scientist tradition ​

Demographics: the education-attendance correlation ​

The post-2007 transparency turn ​

Comparative context ​

What the CES Letter omits ​

Concrete questions a serious skeptical reader will press ​

The Book of Mormon as anchor ​

Assessment ​