Prophets
Latter-day Saints believe their living leaders are prophets, men who can receive revelation from God for the whole Church. That is a strong claim, and the CES Letter's prophets section sets out to break it by gathering episodes where a Church leader taught something the Church later abandoned, stacking them up, and arguing that prophets whose teachings keep changing cannot be trusted at all.
But the argument leans on a premise the Church has never taught: that a prophet is supposed to be infallible, right about everything, all the time. Joseph Smith taught the reverse. Pressed in 1843 on where the office stops, he set the boundary himself, saying "a prophet was a prophet only when he was acting as such."[1] The Doctrine and Covenants opens the same way. Section one has the Lord handing commandments to flawed servants "in their weakness," fully expecting that "inasmuch as they erred it might be made known."[2]
A church that runs on living revelation put the chance of human error right into its first canonized page. So the real test has never been whether a leader can stumble. It is what the Church does afterward. Take the episodes the CES Letter picked, and in each one the correction is already sitting in the record.
The cases the CES Letter chose
Three of the CES Letter's four examples trace back to a single figure: Brigham Young, who held more authority than anyone else in nineteenth-century Mormonism. If the Church could correct a teaching of his, no leader was beyond its reach.
Adam-God is the clearest case. Brigham taught that Adam was God the Father, preached it from the pulpit, published it under his own name, and even read a version of it into the temple ceremony. By the CES Letter's logic that should have made it binding doctrine. It never came close.
A senior apostle, Orson Pratt, contradicted it in print while Brigham was alive and preaching it, and held his ground for years. In 1860 the First Presidency had a clean chance to canonize the teaching and instead let the subject stand unsettled. Later prophets rejected it outright. The teaching was never put to the Church for the sustaining vote that turns a leader's view into doctrine, so it never became doctrine at all.
Blood atonement, the teaching that some sins are so grave only the sinner's own blood could pay for them, is the second case, and it reveals how selectively the CES Letter reads its sources. The fierce sermon the CES Letter quotes was preached in September 1856, in the heat of a frontier revival. By February, from that same pulpit, Brigham told the Saints almost the opposite: if they would "sin no more, but faithfully live their religion, their sins will be forgiven them without taking life."[3]
Both sermons sit in the same volume the CES Letter cites, yet it reproduces the September fire and drops the winter walk-back. That rhetoric never became doctrine, never turned into policy, and was never once put into practice.
The priesthood and temple ban is the painful one, and nothing here tries to smooth it over. For about 126 years, Black members could not be ordained and could not enter the temple. The cost fell on real people.
Jane Manning James spent four decades asking senior leaders for her temple blessings and was refused every single time.[4] A defense that pretended that did not happen would not be worth reading, so this site does not pretend it.
Where the CES Letter overreaches is its claim that the ban goes all the way back to the beginning. It does not. The early Restoration baptized Black members and ordained at least one Black man; the ban traces only to Brigham Young in 1852. And unlike every other major revelation in Church history, it came with no transcript of revelation and no canonized declaration, none of the usual paper trail.[5]
When something did finally arrive through that channel, it was the 1978 revelation, reached after months of fasting and long stretches alone in the temple, when the First Presidency and the Twelve described a shared outpouring of the Spirit that none of them ever walked back.[6] Eleven weeks afterward, Bruce R. McConkie, who had been among the ban's firmest defenders, stood before an audience and said:
"Forget everything that I have said, or what President Brigham Young or President George Q. Cannon or whomsoever has said in days past that is contrary to the present revelation... It doesn't make a particle of difference what anybody ever said about the Negro matter before the first day of June of this year, 1978. It is a new day."[7]
When a leader stands up in public and unsays a position he had held for years, you are watching a church correct itself out loud, in front of everyone, the opposite of a quiet edit nobody is meant to notice.
A claim of a different shape
The fourth item on the CES Letter's list sits oddly beside the rest. Whatever else Mark Hofmann was, he was no prophet, and he taught no doctrine for the Church to later disown. He was a gifted forger, and the grievance is that Church leaders were taken in by his fakes. They were. So was the FBI's document laboratory. So was the Library of Congress. So was the handwriting expert who had just unmasked the forged Hitler diaries. Each of them studied Hofmann's documents with the best forensic tools available and pronounced them real.[8]
The CES Letter wants "prophetic discernment" to have caught what trained scientists missed, yet scripture sets a humbler bar. The Lord told Joseph Smith directly that even he could not "always tell the wicked from the righteous."[9]
Two of the CES Letter's factual claims in this part are flatly false. It says the Church purchased the Salamander Letter, one of Hofmann's forgeries that recast the Church's origins in occult terms, and then buried it.
On the first count, the buyer was a private collector who later donated the letter; the Church never bought it from Hofmann.[10] On the second, far from burying it, the Church ran the full text of the letter in the Church News in April 1985, months ahead of the exposure and while nearly everyone still took it for authentic.[11] You do not hide a document by printing every word of it in your own newspaper.
What the record shows
The CES Letter rounded up these cases to argue that prophets who change their teachings cannot be trusted. Line them up, though, and they tell the opposite story: a church catching and fixing its own mistakes through the very tools it has claimed since 1830.
An apostle pushed back in real time. A First Presidency declined to canonize a teaching the prophet was preaching. A prophet softened his own sermon inside a single winter. A later revelation overturned a long wrong while the man who had defended it longest recanted in public.
Notice, too, that the test is rigged to fail both ways. Hold to a teaching and the prophet is called stubborn; change it and critics ask why anyone should have believed him in the first place. No living institution clears a bar set that low. A church that promises continuing revelation through imperfect men should be expected to do exactly this: clarify, refine, and once in a while overturn.
The whole case never depended on the prophets being flawless, which they never claimed to be. They are fallible men, and correcting one of them is no crack in the foundation. It is the surest sign the channel is still open, that God has not stopped speaking and the canon was never sealed shut. The episodes the CES Letter stacks up as a verdict against the prophets are, read against the Church's own claims, the clearest evidence that the thing it is testing is still alive.
Joseph Smith, History of the Church, 5:265 (1843): "a prophet was a prophet only when he was acting as such." The CES Letter waves off this standard Latter-day Saint distinction in passing ("I'm told that prophets are just men who are only prophets when acting as such") without noting that Joseph Smith himself was the one who drew it. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Prophets," p. 68. ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 1:24–28: "These commandments are of me, and were given unto my servants in their weakness, after the manner of their language, that they might come to understanding... and inasmuch as they erred it might be made known." Compare Articles of Faith 1:9, which promises that God "will yet reveal many great and important things," that is, ongoing revelation rather than a closed canon. ↩︎
Brigham Young, February 8, 1857, Journal of Discourses 4:219–220: if the people "will sin no more, but faithfully live their religion, their sins will be forgiven them without taking life." Delivered roughly four months after the September 21, 1856 sermon the CES Letter quotes (Journal of Discourses 4:53–54), in the same Bowery on Temple Square. See also the Church's Gospel Topics essay "Peace and Violence among 19th-Century Latter-day Saints," which confirms the blood-atonement rhetoric was never doctrine, policy, or practice. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/peace-and-violence-among-19th-century-latter-day-saints. ↩︎
Church History Topics, "Jane Elizabeth Manning James" and "Elijah Able," The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics/jane-elizabeth-manning-james and https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics/elijah-able. James petitioned senior leaders for her temple endowment across four decades and was denied each time, receiving it only by proxy in 1979; Abel was ordained to the Melchizedek Priesthood in 1836 under authority delegated by Joseph Smith, served three missions, and was denied his endowment by Brigham Young and John Taylor. ↩︎
"Race and the Priesthood," Gospel Topics Essays, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/race-and-the-priesthood. The essay notes that Church records offer no clear insight into the origin of the restriction and that it began under Brigham Young, not Joseph Smith; the early Restoration saw Black members baptized and at least one Black man, Elijah Abel, ordained. On the absence of any contemporary written revelation underlying the ban, see also W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (Oxford University Press, 2015). ↩︎
Edward L. Kimball, "Spencer W. Kimball and the Revelation on Priesthood," BYU Studies 47, no. 2 (2008): 4–78. https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/spencer-w-kimball-and-the-revelation-on-priesthood/. Documents the multi-year preparation: written memos requested from individual apostles in 1977, repeated solitary visits to the temple, and the June 1, 1978 meeting in which the First Presidency and ten of the Twelve reported a unified spiritual experience, recounted consistently and never retracted across decades of independent accounts. ↩︎
Bruce R. McConkie, "All Are Alike unto God," CES Religious Educators Symposium, Brigham Young University, August 18, 1978: "Forget everything that I have said, or what President Brigham Young or President George Q. Cannon or whomsoever has said in days past that is contrary to the present revelation... It doesn't make a particle of difference what anybody ever said about the Negro matter before the first day of June of this year, 1978. It is a new day." McConkie had defended the restriction in his own Mormon Doctrine (1958, 1966). https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/bruce-r-mcconkie/alike-unto-god/. ↩︎
Richard E. Turley Jr., Victims: The LDS Church and the Mark Hofmann Case (University of Illinois Press, 1992); Dallin H. Oaks, "Recent Events Involving Church History and Forged Documents," Ensign, October 1987. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1987/10/recent-events-involving-church-history-and-forged-documents. The FBI's document laboratory, the Library of Congress (which nearly purchased Hofmann's forged "Oath of a Freeman"), and Kenneth Rendell, who had broken the Hitler diaries case the year before, all examined Hofmann documents and found them genuine. The forgeries were exposed only after the 1985 bombings, by forensic chemistry (George Throckmorton and William Flynn) that had not previously existed. ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 10:37: "But as you cannot always judge the righteous, or as you cannot always tell the wicked from the righteous... hold your peace." The verse, given directly to Joseph Smith, places the limits of discernment inside the canon itself; compare Joshua 9, where Joshua is deceived by the Gibeonites because the leaders "asked not counsel at the mouth of the Lord." ↩︎
Oaks, "Recent Events," Ensign, October 1987; Turley, Victims. The Salamander Letter was purchased from Hofmann in January 1984 by Steven F. Christensen, a private collector and bishop, in his personal capacity. Christensen donated it to the Church as a gift in April 1985, more than a year later. The Church did not purchase it from Hofmann. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Prophets," no. 5 ("Mark Hofmann"), pp. 66–67. ↩︎
"Letter on Mormon Church origins is called genuine," Church News, April 28, 1985, which printed the complete text of the Salamander Letter, over five months before the bombings and nearly two years before forensic analysis exposed the forgery, while the document was still widely believed authentic. Suppression of a document whose full text the Church published in its own newspaper is not supportable on the record. ↩︎