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, and a reasonable person can ask it in good faith. 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.
Four complaints carry the load: how the Church keeps its money, how it tells its history, how it changed its own name, and how it treats the scholars inside it. Each rests on a documented fact. The work of this overview is to show those facts at full size, grant what is fair in each, and then test the verdict the section stacks on top.
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, and documented. The implication built on top, that an institution which audits itself and discloses nothing must be hiding theft, does not follow from a policy that thousands of private charities share.
The same move runs through the rest. 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 modern teaching manual really did drop the clause "who has means" from an 1899 Lorenzo Snow tithing sermon, 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 hand over 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.
That single excision is the whole method in miniature, and it is not unique to one story. A 2017 General Conference talk by Valeri Cordón runs the same pattern: the CES Letter quotes the demanding tithing counsel and stops at the cliffhanger, omitting the Monday-morning resolution where the family's need is met.[5] The technique is consistent. Quote the hard half, drop the half that reframes it.
Where the criticism holds up
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.
Two of the concessions cut deeper than wishing a manual were different, and they deserve to be named at full strength rather than waved past. The first is financial. In February 2023 the Securities and Exchange Commission settled charges that the Church's investment arm, Ensign Peak, had spread its portfolio across thirteen shell companies for roughly two decades specifically to hide the fund's size, with the First Presidency and Presiding Bishopric approving the structure.[6] Samuel Brunson, a tax-law professor at Loyola University Chicago and a practicing Latter-day Saint, read the order without flinching:
"It's not that mistakes were made — it's that the church took deliberate action to do wrong."[7]
That is a faithful scholar, not a hostile outsider, calling deliberate concealment what it was. The settlement is real, and it stays a concession.
The second is institutional. In September 1993, six Latter-day Saint scholars and writers were disciplined within a single month, an event known as the September Six, four months after a senior apostle named "the so-called scholars or intellectuals" among the dangers facing the Church.[8] Patrick Mason, who holds an endowed chair in Mormon history at Utah State University and remains a believing member, has documented what followed: a "lost generation" of Mormon studies from roughly 1993 to 2005, in which young scholars learned to self-censor and the field stalled. Mason does not soften it into a tidy recovery; he names scars that did not fully heal.[8:1] A faithful answer that takes the September Six seriously cannot pretend the chilling effect was fiction.
What the section does with its 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
"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."[9]
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, 18,822 pages, and 49,687 footnotes prepared to archival standards.[10] 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.[11]
The items the section says the Church suppresses are, by 2017, items the Church has published on its own website under its own seal. The seer-stone translation method, the multiple First Vision accounts, the polyandry: each has its own essay. To photograph a body in motion and caption the still image as if the body were standing still goes past reporting into a choice about what the reader is allowed to see.
What the section leaves out of frame
Set the heated verdict aside and look at the affirmative record the section never lets into the room. The strongest answer to "this institution fears thought and hoards its wealth" is not a denial but a ledger of what the institution actually does.
Take the charge of anti-intellectualism first, because it has the single most damning quotation behind it. "When our leaders speak, the thinking has been done" ran in a 1945 ward-teaching message, and it is the strongest sentence anyone has ever produced for the claim that the Church wants members to stop thinking. Within months the sitting prophet, George Albert Smith, put the opposite in writing:
"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."[12]
The single hardest quote in the case was disavowed by the prophet of the Church months after it appeared, and traced internally to a clerk who published it without review. The Anti-Intellectualism article documents the same pattern across all nine of the load-bearing quotations: each is real, and each lives inside a context the CES Letter does not show.
Against that quote-dense case the article sets the Church's four universities, the September Six in full and uneven context, and one fact that runs backward to the accusation. Among Latter-day Saints, more education tracks with higher church activity, with attendance reaching seventy to eighty percent among members holding sixteen or more years of schooling, the reverse of nearly every other American faith.[13] Hugh B. Brown, a member of the First Presidency, 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."[14] An institution afraid of thinking does not build that.
The money charge inverts the same way once the numbers are restored. The CES Letter compares the roughly $1.5 billion City Creek development against $1.4 billion of humanitarian aid spread across twenty-six years, and reads the gap as greed. But the comparison is apples to oranges: the $1.4 billion is a single narrow cash line, leaving out the welfare system, the storehouses, the universities, and the missionary program. In 2024 alone the Church reported $1.45 billion in charitable expenditures across 192 countries, more in one year than the entire twenty-six-year figure the CES Letter cites.[15] And City Creek was not built from tithing. Gordon B. Hinckley said so from the General Conference pulpit in 2003:
"I wish to give the entire Church the assurance that tithing funds have not and will not be used to acquire this property. Nor will they be used in developing it for commercial purposes."[16]
In January 2025 the Ninth Circuit examined that exact funding mechanism in the Huntsman case and dismissed the fraud claim eleven judges to none.[17] The Church Finances article walks through the 1959 disclosure, the Ensign Peak settlement, City Creek, and the Vigil story with its storehouse sentence put back. Underneath all of it sits the counter-text the section needs and never quotes. Asked at the National Press Club in 2022 about tithing in poverty, David Bednar answered:
"The Church does not need their money, but those people need the blessings that come from obeying God's commandments."[18]
The name charge collapses on a smaller and more basic error. The CES Letter's red display block insists the 1830 Church was "Church of Jesus Christ" and asks why Joseph took "Jesus Christ" out. But the 1830 name was "Church of Christ," not "Church of Jesus Christ," a point the founding revelation and the Joseph Smith Papers state outright.[19] So the 1834 change did not remove the words the CES Letter says it removed. What the Names of the Church article shows is iteration, not erasure: the 1834 conference vote was a parliamentary motion seconded and "passed by unanimous voice," and the 1838 revelation then settled the full name by the Lord's own word.
"For thus shall my church be called in the last days, even The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints."[20]
That name has stood for nearly two centuries, and in 2018 Russell M. Nelson renewed the emphasis on it, framing the move not as a change but as a return: "It is a correction. It is the command of the Lord."[21] A Church that responds to its own naming history through revelation is the opposite of the static, defensive institution the section needs the reader to picture.
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, including 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.[22]
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.
And keep the author's own admission in view, because it is the truest sentence in the section. None of this matters if the foundational truth claims hold. The hardest of these concerns, the SEC settlement, the September Six, are real, and the answers to them are real too, but they all live at one level: an institution run by imperfect people, never the institution's claim to be true. That is the boundary the section needs the reader to forget, and the whole case for distrust is built on the far side of it. 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 argument has been living all along.
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. ↩︎
Valeri V. Cordón, "The Language of the Gospel," April 2017 General Conference, Saturday Afternoon Session. The CES Letter quotes the talk's tithing scene and stops before its Monday-morning resolution; the talk's actual subject is how parents teach gospel principles through observable action. See the Church Finances article. Cf. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Other Concerns," pp. 116–117. ↩︎
SEC Order 34-96951, February 21, 2023 — the actual settlement document in In the Matter of Ensign Peak Advisors, Inc., and the Corporation of the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Documents the 13 shell LLCs, the First Presidency / Presiding Bishopric approvals, the deliberate-concealment motivation, and the legal violation. The combined penalty was $5 million ($1M Church, $4M Ensign Peak). See the Church Finances article. https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/admin/2023/34-96951.pdf ↩︎
Samuel D. Brunson, "The Church, the Investment Advisor, and the SEC," By Common Consent, February 21, 2023. Same-day faithful tax-law analysis of the SEC settlement reading the SEC Order's text directly. Brunson concludes: "It's not that mistakes were made — it's that the church took deliberate action to do wrong." https://bycommonconsent.com/2023/02/21/the-church-the-investment-advisor-and-the-sec/ ↩︎
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; PhD in history from the University of Notre Dame; 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. The "so-called scholars or intellectuals" phrase is from Boyd K. Packer's May 18, 1993 address to the All-Church Coordinating Council. See the Anti-Intellectualism article. ↩︎ ↩︎
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." ↩︎
"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. ↩︎
"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). ↩︎
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. See the Anti-Intellectualism article. ↩︎
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. ↩︎
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. See the Anti-Intellectualism article. ↩︎
"A World of Caring: A Closer Look at the Church's Global Assistance Efforts," Church Newsroom, 2024 Caring for Those in Need Summary. $1.45B in expenditures; 3,836 projects; 192 countries and territories; 6.6M volunteer hours. See the Church Finances article. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/2024-caring-for-those-in-need-summary ↩︎
Gordon B. Hinckley, "The Condition of the Church," April 2003 General Conference. The foundational public statement on City Creek financing: "tithing funds have not and will not be used to acquire this property. Nor will they be used in developing it for commercial purposes. Funds for this have come and will come from those commercial entities owned by the Church. These resources, together with the earnings of invested reserve funds, will accommodate this program." https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2003/04/the-condition-of-the-church?lang=eng ↩︎
Huntsman v. Corporation of the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, No. 21-56056 (9th Cir. en banc, January 31, 2025). Eleven-judge en banc panel; 11-0 dismissal. The opinion documents Hinckley's April 2003 statement on its actual terms and the 2003 Church investment earnings increase of approximately $3.9 billion that exceeded the $1.4 billion City Creek allocation. See the Church Finances article. https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2025/01/31/21-56056.pdf ↩︎
David A. Bednar, response during the post-address Q&A at the National Press Club Newsmaker event, Washington D.C., May 26, 2022: "The Church does not need their money, but those people need the blessings that come from obeying God's commandments." Given in response to a journalist's question about tithing in poverty/war contexts, not in the prepared remarks. See the Church Finances article. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/elder-bednar-national-press-club-summary ↩︎
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. ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 115:1–4. The April 26, 1838 revelation received at Far West, Missouri. Verse 4 reads: "For thus shall my church be called in the last days, even The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints." https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/115 ↩︎
Russell M. Nelson, "The Correct Name of the Church," General Conference, October 2018, Sunday Morning Session. Nelson cites D&C 115:4 and 3 Nephi 27:7–8 as canonical anchors and frames the renewed emphasis: "It is a correction. It is the command of the Lord." See the Names of the Church article. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2018/10/the-correct-name-of-the-church ↩︎
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. ↩︎