Other Concerns
Most of the CES Letter argues that the Church is not true. This last stretch argues something quieter: that it is not honest. The two are not the same charge, and the author knows it. He files these complaints under a heading that grants the point before the reader reaches it. These concerns, he writes, "are secondary to all of the above," and they "do not matter if the foundational truth claims… are not true."[1]
Take him at his word. Nothing collected here claims the Book of Mormon was invented or the First Vision never happened. The question has changed. It is no longer is the Church true? but can you trust the institution that teaches it? That is a fair thing to ask. It is also a different thing, and the difference is worth keeping in view, because the section that follows leans hard on the reader forgetting it.
One move, four times
Read the four complaints back to back and the same maneuver surfaces in each. A real fact gets paired with an implication the fact will not carry.
The Church did stop publishing detailed financial statements in 1959. True. The implication built on top, that an institution which audits itself and discloses nothing is hiding theft, does not follow from a policy that thousands of private charities share. A correlation-era Sunday School manual really did change Brigham Young's "wives" to "[wife]," brackets and all.[2] True, and a fair thing to dislike. The leap from a sanitized teaching manual to a Church concealing its own past is the part the edit does not prove. A 1953 reprint of a Lorenzo Snow tithing sermon really did drop the clause "who has means," turning a conditional plea into what reads like an unconditional command.[3] Also true, also worth wishing undone. None of it adds up to the verdict the section wants, which is a uniquely dishonest organization keeping its books, its history, and its members' minds under lock.
The clearest case is the one the section spends the most on. A December 2012 Ensign story quotes a bishop in Argentina counseling a struggling family to pay tithing even when money is tight. Read alone, it sounds like a church telling the hungry to give it their last dollar. On the same page sits a sentence the quotation removes: the family "received some commodities from the bishops' storehouse during their financial difficulties."[4] The Church was feeding them while it taught them. Cut that line and the story means one thing. Restore it and it means nearly the opposite. The fact was real the whole time. The implication lived only in what got left out.
Where the criticism lands
A confident answer can grant that not all of this is unfair. More financial transparency genuinely would build trust, and "the Lord knows even if you don't" is a harder thing to ask of members in 2017 than it was in 1959. The Snow tithing edit was a real omission that narrowed the original, and faithful members can reasonably wish the manual had left the sermon whole. To pretend every complaint in this section is baseless would be its own small dishonesty.
What the section does with those fair points is the problem. It wraps them in language so heated the valid ones go down with the invalid. The case climbs to a syllogism that sets the Church beside "a totalitarian system such as North Korea or George Orwell's 1984."[5] North Korea jails and starves the people who try to leave. A church you can walk out of on a Tuesday afternoon, keep your job, keep your family, and never look back, is not that. The comparison does not make the real concerns weigh more. It makes them weigh less, because a reader who notices the exaggeration starts marking down everything around it, the accurate alongside the absurd.
A snapshot held still
Underneath the overreach runs a subtler distortion, and it is the one that matters most. It is a matter of tense. The CES Letter takes an institution caught in the middle of changing and presents the freeze-frame as a final verdict.
Look at when this document was built. It was assembled in 2013 and revised in 2017, the exact stretch in which the Church was moving fast in the direction the section says it refuses to go. Those were the years of the Joseph Smith Papers, the documentary edition that eventually ran to twenty-seven volumes prepared to archival standards. The years of the Gospel Topics Essays, in which the Church took up its own hardest subjects, seer stones, polygamy, the priesthood restriction, race, under its own name. The years it began publishing Saints, a four-volume narrative history that tells those same stories and keeps the parts a public-relations office would cut.[6] To photograph a body in motion and caption the still image as if the body were standing still is not reporting. It is a choice about what the reader is allowed to see.
The move is portable
You do not need this site to walk you through the rest of the section. The four sub-articles do the close work, and each one restores something the original removed.
Transparency and Censorship takes up the central charge, that the Church buried its history, and tests it against the actual record: the 2013 Official Declaration 2 header, the altered manuals, and the Richard Bushman line printed at the head of the section. Bushman did say "the dominant narrative is not true; it can't be sustained," but the surrounding sentence, which the cover crops away, has him urging the Church to reconstruct that narrative honestly so the faith can stand, which is the opposite of a confession.[7] Church Finances walks through the 1959 disclosure, the Ensign Peak settlement, City Creek, and the 2012 tithing story with its storehouse sentence put back. Names of the Church catches the three-name argument misstating its own first step: the 1830 name was "Church of Christ," not "Church of Jesus Christ," so the 1834 change did not remove the words the Letter insists it removed.[8] And Anti-Intellectualism sets the quote-dense case that the Church punishes thinkers against its four universities, the September Six in full context, and a pattern that runs backward to the accusation: among Latter-day Saints, more education tracks with higher church activity, the reverse of nearly every other American faith.[9]
There is one habit worth carrying out of this section, and it costs nothing to use. When the next item arrives, a quote, a statistic, an alteration, separate the fact from what you are being told it means. Ask what the surrounding sentence said. Ask whether the snapshot froze a thing that was already moving. Ask whether the comparison is doing argument or doing theater. The facts in this section mostly survive that questioning. It is the conclusions stacked on top of them that come loose. Run the test on the next page you read, anywhere, and watch how often the gap between what happened and what it supposedly proves is where the whole case has been living.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Other Concerns," p. 112. The section opens under the heading framing the Church's "Dishonesty, Censorship, and Whitewashing Over Its History" and states that these concerns are secondary to the foundational truth claims. ↩︎
Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Brigham Young (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1997), ch. 23. The manual renders Brigham Young's "wives" as "[wife]" in two places, the brackets signaling an editorial change. See the Transparency and Censorship article for the full discussion. Cf. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Other Concerns," pp. 115–116. ↩︎
Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Lorenzo Snow (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2012) reproduces Snow's 1899 General Conference tithing address with an ellipsis in place of the clause "who has means." See the Church Finances article. Cf. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Other Concerns," p. 116. ↩︎
Aaron L. West, "Sacred Transformations," Ensign, December 2012. The article on the Vigil family states, on the same page as the bishop's tithing counsel, that the family "received some commodities from the bishops' storehouse during their financial difficulties," the sentence omitted from the CES Letter's quotation. Cf. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Other Concerns," p. 116. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Other Concerns," p. 125. The section's closing syllogism equates the combined concerns with "policies and practices you'd expect to find in a totalitarian system such as North Korea or George Orwell's 1984; not from the gospel of Jesus Christ." ↩︎
"The Joseph Smith Papers," Church Historian's Press, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/; "Gospel Topics Essays," The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/; Saints: The Story of the Church of Jesus Christ in the Latter Days, 4 vols. (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2018–2024). ↩︎
Richard L. Bushman, "Faith Again" fireside, June 12, 2016. In context: "I think for the Church to remain strong it has to reconstruct its narrative. The dominant narrative is not true; it can't be sustained. The Church has to absorb all this new information or it will be on very shaky grounds, and that's what it's trying to do." Bushman, author of Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Knopf, 2005) and a stake patriarch, remains a defender of the Restoration's truth claims. See the Transparency and Censorship article. ↩︎
The Articles and Covenants of the Church, now Doctrine and Covenants 20:1, open with "The rise of the Church of Christ in these last days." The Joseph Smith Papers editorial summary states: "The first name used to denote the church JS organized on 6 April 1830 was 'the Church of Christ.'" The current name was established by revelation (D&C 115:4) on April 26, 1838. See the Names of the Church article. Cf. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Other Concerns," pp. 119–120. ↩︎
Tim B. Heaton and Stan L. Albrecht, research on Latter-day Saint religiosity finding that members with sixteen or more years of formal education attend church at roughly seventy to eighty percent, inverting the education-activity pattern documented across most other American religious traditions. See the Anti-Intellectualism article for the full positive case, including the Church's four universities and the September Six in context. ↩︎