Testimony & Spiritual Witnesses
Ask a Latter-day Saint how they know the Church is true and you will often hear about a feeling: a warmth, a peace, a quiet certainty that came while they prayed. That personal conviction that the gospel is true is what members mean by a testimony.
The catch is that a devout Catholic at Mass, a Pentecostal mid-worship, and a Muslim rising from prayer describe the very same feeling. If the experience is identical from the inside, the CES Letter asks, how can the feeling be proof of anything? Four people in four contradictory religions cannot all be right.
It is a fair question, and a serious one that philosophers have worked on for over a century. The trouble is that the testimony the section sets out to knock down is not the one the scriptures actually describe.
The whole section rests on one assumption: that a Latter-day Saint testimony is just "pray about it and trust whatever feeling comes back." Three opening quotes prime the reader for that, including a therapist's "Feelings Aren't Facts" and a Church-owned ad agency that boasted it sells through "HeartSell."[1]
Then come the exhibits, each aimed at that one assumption: every religion reports the same confirmation, a beloved Church leader moved crowds to tears with war stories he later admitted he had made up, and a member who felt the Spirit at a violent war movie and again at a children's cartoon.[2] If a testimony really were nothing but a feeling, each of those exhibits would score a clean hit. But scripture asks for far more than a feeling, and the section never engages that harder version.
The method the section skips
Oliver Cowdery once tried to translate by simply asking for the words. The answer that came back was a correction:
"you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right" (D&C 9:7-9)
Thinking comes first, and only then the confirmation. The same revelation also leaves room for a no: when the answer is wrong, the seeker gets "a stupor of thought," a blank where the warm feeling would have been. The feeling-only process the critics describe always says yes. This one can tell you that you have it wrong.
And there is more to it than feeling. Moroni's promise, usually shortened to "pray and you'll feel it," actually sets several conditions, and the one most often dropped is real intent: a commitment to act on the answer even when acting will cost you something (Moroni 10:3-5). Alma compares the whole process to growing a plant from seed: you bury it, water it, and watch across a season whether it puts down roots, judging it by what it grows into rather than by the first day in the soil (Alma 32). That is a skill built over years, not an impulse felt in a theater.
A jolt of emotion at a war film or a cartoon is real, but it skips every part of that process. So when the CES Letter lines up four nearly identical testimonies, from a Latter-day Saint and three breakaway groups each sure their church is the only true one, the lineup proves less than it looks, since all four already share the Book of Mormon. The article on these competing spiritual claims takes that up directly.
What the doctrine already predicts
Latter-day Saint scripture teaches that the Light of Christ, a measure of God's influence, is "given to every man" (Moroni 7:16). So a Catholic moved to tears at Mass is not a problem the doctrine has to explain away; it is exactly what the doctrine predicts. The shared spiritual experience the CES Letter offers as a refutation is something the scriptures claimed first.
That universal light, though, never settles a specific historical question, like whether a particular man was a prophet or a record is ancient. For that the scriptures describe a further, more particular witness, reached through that studied, fruit-tested process, not the warmth available to everyone.
None of this means discernment never fails. Members really did feel something hearing those invented war stories before anyone knew they were false, and scripture takes that danger for granted. Why else would it tell believers to "try the spirits whether they are of God" (1 John 4:1), if confusing a strong emotion for the Spirit were not something that actually happens?
Where that line falls, and what a stirred-up feeling really can and cannot show, is the subject of the article on the reliability of spiritual witnesses. The sharpest exhibit of all, a revelation that sent Joseph's associates to Canada to sell the Book of Mormon copyright and seemingly failed, turns on a conditional clause the CES Letter's source quietly drops, traced in the article on failed revelations.
So the real disagreement was never over whether sincere people in other faiths feel God at work. Of course they do, and Latter-day Saint scripture said as much before the CES Letter ever raised it. The disagreement is over the method.
A feeling can be manufactured in a dark theater in ninety minutes. A life slowly rebuilt over decades, in answer to a question that was studied out, prayed over, and acted on at real cost, is a different kind of evidence altogether. The section aimed at the first kind and called it the whole of a testimony.
And the witness members describe does not hang in the air on its own. It points at something you can pick up and read: the Book of Mormon, an actual book, open to study and to anyone who wants to test it. A feeling can be talked away in an afternoon. The thing this witness is reaching for sits on the table the whole time, and it does not dissolve when the questions get hard.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Testimony & Spiritual Witness," p. 74. The page opens with epigraphs chosen to prime the reader before any argument: Barton Goldsmith ("Feelings Aren't Facts"), the LDS-owned Bonneville Communications describing its "HeartSell" advertising approach, and a FairMormon line on how the Holy Spirit testifies "through feelings." ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Testimony & Spiritual Witness," pp. 74-79. The numbered exhibits include parallel testimonies from competing Restoration churches (pp. 74-75), the Canadian copyright revelation (pp. 76-77), the Paul H. Dunn fabrications (p. 77), and feeling the Spirit during films such as Saving Private Ryan and The Lion King (p. 79). ↩︎