Competing Spiritual Claims
The claim:
"Every major religion has members who claim the same thing: God or God's spirit bore witness to them that their religion, prophet/pope/leaders, book(s), and teachings are true."[1]
"Just as it would be arrogant for a FLDS member, a Jehovah's Witness, a Catholic, a Seventh-day Adventist, or a Muslim to deny a Latter-day Saint's spiritual experience and testimony of the truthfulness of Mormonism, it would likewise be arrogant for a Latter-day Saint to deny others' spiritual experiences and testimonies of the truthfulness of their own religion. Yet, every religion cannot be right and true together…
Same method: read, ponder, and pray. Different testimonies. All four testimonies cannot simultaneously be true. Is this the best God can come up with in revealing His truth to His children? Only .2% of the world's population are members of God's one true Church. This is God's model and standard of efficiency?"[2]
Boiled down, the argument is this. A Catholic prays and feels God confirm the Catholic faith. A Muslim prays and feels God confirm Islam. A Latter-day Saint prays and feels God confirm the Restoration. They cannot all be right, since their religions flatly contradict each other, yet each one walks away sure. So the warm, settled feeling people call a witness of the Spirit cannot actually point you to the true church. Everybody's feeling points a different direction.
It is a fair question, and the place to begin is by granting the part that is true: people in other faiths really do have sincere, powerful spiritual experiences. A Catholic at Mass, a Sufi lost in devotion, a Pentecostal overcome in worship are not faking it and are not simply Latter-day Saints using different words. Their experiences are real. Any answer that starts by denying that is not worth your time.
What the CES Letter never does is engage what Latter-day Saint scripture actually teaches about all of this. And when you look, the doctrine does not flinch at other people's spiritual experiences. It predicted them, in writing, almost two hundred years ago.
The doctrine already saw this coming
The objection assumes the Church teaches "we are right, everyone else is wrong, and their experiences are illusions or the devil." That is not the doctrine. Latter-day Saints believe in two different sources of spiritual light, and keeping them straight dissolves most of the problem.
The first is called the Light of Christ. Scripture says it is given to every single person born into the world, of every nation and faith, to help them know good from evil and feel drawn toward truth.[3] It is the reason a Buddhist can find real clarity in meditation and a Hindu can feel real love before her chosen deity. The second is the gift of the Holy Ghost, which a member receives by covenant after baptism, and which testifies of specific truths: that the Book of Mormon is the word of God, that Joseph Smith was a prophet.
Read that way, the worldwide spread of genuine spiritual experience is not a problem for the doctrine. It is the prediction the doctrine makes. If the Light of Christ really is given to everyone, then people everywhere should report sincere experiences of love, peace, and moral truth, distributed across every tradition rather than bottled up in one. That is exactly what researchers find. A 2023 Pew study reported that most American adults consider themselves spiritual and nearly half report a sudden feeling of connection with something beyond this world, and these experiences turn up across religions and among people of no religion at all.[4]
The Church has put this in plain language at the highest level. In 1978 the First Presidency, the three men who lead the Church, wrote:
"The great religious leaders of the world such as Mohammed, Confucius, and the Reformers, as well as philosophers including Socrates, Plato, and others, received a portion of God's light. Moral truths were given to them by God to enlighten whole nations and to bring a higher level of understanding to individuals."[5]
Nothing in that is grudging. The leaders of the Church are saying outright that God gave real light to Mohammed, to Confucius, to the Protestant Reformers, to Socrates and Plato. Scholars call this view religious inclusivism: truth and genuine spiritual experience are spread through every tradition, and the Restoration adds specific further truth on top of that partial light, rather than calling everyone else's experience fake.[6] When a teaching expects other people to have real spiritual experiences, those experiences confirm it rather than threaten it.
The four "testimonies" are not from across the world
The section's centerpiece is a lineup of four testimonies worded almost identically, each declaring its church the one true one. Read the fine print and they are not a Catholic, a Muslim, a Hindu, and a Buddhist. They are four branches of the same family: a Latter-day Saint, a member of the polygamist FLDS Church, a member of the Reorganized Church led by Joseph Smith's son, and a member of a tiny British offshoot.[2:1] All four carry the Book of Mormon. All four revere Joseph Smith. They agree on most of their theology. The single thing they fight about is who rightly held authority after Joseph was killed in 1844.
So the actual exhibit is narrow: four groups born from the Restoration disagree about succession. That is a real question, but it is a long way from "no spiritual experience anywhere can tell the world's religions apart." (The broader version of that challenge is the stronger one, and the in-depth version takes it on at full strength.)
There is a second thing hiding in the fine print. The promise these seekers are leaning on, Moroni's invitation at the end of the Book of Mormon, asks God to confirm whether the book is true. It never asks God to confirm which church is the right one. The Latter-day Saint case for the Church's authority rests on something else entirely: priesthood restored through specific historical events. So four Restoration groups all keeping the Book of Mormon and praying about it, and all getting a yes, is not really four contradictory answers. It is several groups, including people who left the main Church and had every reason to throw the book away, agreeing that the one thing the promise actually covers is true. That cuts in the book's favor, not against it.
A testimony is built from many strands
The objection pictures a Latter-day Saint testimony as one thing: "I felt warm inside, so the Church is true." If that were all a testimony was, a contradicting feeling from someone else really would cancel it out. But that is not how the framework builds a testimony, and it is not how a thoughtful member holds one.
A mature testimony is a cumulative case, many separate lines of evidence pointing the same way.[7] The spiritual witness is one of those lines. Alongside it sit the Book of Mormon itself as a book that is hard to explain, eleven witnesses who said they saw the gold plates and stood by it for life, specific impressions that later proved right, doctrine that held up when it was lived, and the fruits of a faithful life watched over years. Weigh the spiritual feeling by itself and yes, it is one line among many, and a contradicting feeling can answer it. Weigh the whole case and a single feeling somewhere else is not nearly enough to tip it. Latter-day Saint scripture insists on this directly: the seeker is told to "study it out" in the mind first and only then pray, and to seek learning "by study and also by faith," both together, never feelings by themselves.
This is why the comparison the CES Letter draws is not quite fair. It lines up abstract "spiritual feelings" side by side and notes they look alike. But a Catholic praying through Catholic ritual and a Latter-day Saint praying about the Book of Mormon are not testing the same kind of claim, and each tradition's full case, its history, its scripture, its evidence, is different. The feeling was only ever one part of a much larger argument.
No test in the moment
One piece of this does not dissolve, and it deserves to be said straight.
Take a single spiritual experience, all by itself, and there is no clean test a person can run in the moment that sorts a genuine witness of the Holy Ghost from the Light of Christ from ordinary confirmation bias from a Catholic mystic's equally sincere experience. The usual tests do not cut finely enough. "By their fruits" tells virtue from vice, but a devout Catholic life and a devout Latter-day Saint life both grow love, peace, and patience. "Does it match scripture and the prophets" only pushes the question back, because whose scripture and which prophets is the very thing in dispute. At the level of one experience, the line is genuinely hard to draw, and the framework's defenders should grant it.[8]
It gets more uncomfortable inside our own history. Sincere Latter-day Saints have, at times, felt spiritual confirmations of things the Church later walked back. A person in that moment had no inner alarm that the confirmation would not last. That is a real limit, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
Two things keep this from sinking the whole picture, and neither is a trick. First, the framework never claimed the test runs at the level of a single feeling. It runs at the level of a life: the slow growth of testimony, the pattern of impressions and study and fruits accumulating over decades, weighed against the cumulative case rather than one prayer. Second, the doctrine corrects itself out in the open, by later revelation and prophetic course-correction, which is exactly how those earlier confirmations got revisited. The deeper layer the witness is really confirming, that God is real and Christ redeems, has not been the part that changed. (The separate questions of whether feelings can be trusted as evidence at all, and of prophecies that appeared to fail, get their own full treatment in Reliability of Spiritual Witnesses and Failed Revelations.)
The witness was never asked to float
Step all the way back and the objection quietly assumes a spiritual feeling is supposed to float free, a glow with no particular thing attached to it, so that one glow can be set against another and the two can cancel. The Latter-day Saint witness was never asked to float. It was asked to confirm one specific, checkable thing.
That thing is the Book of Mormon. Not a feeling about a book, the book itself: a 269,000-word text dictated out loud in roughly 65 working days, with no notes and no rewrites, making concrete claims about its own ancient origin that anyone is free to examine.[9] A Catholic praying about the Catechism is not praying about a translated ancient record, because the Catechism never claimed to be one. The Book of Mormon does. It can be studied, prayed over, and picked apart, and two centuries of trying has produced no ordinary explanation that holds.
Notice what the CES Letter's own four testimonies have in common. Different as their churches are, every one of those groups kept the Book of Mormon. Even the witnesses the CES Letter musters against the Church end up pointing at the same book. The witness people of many faiths report is real, the Light of Christ touching real hearts, and the doctrine said so first. The thing the Latter-day Saint witness points at is still sitting on the table for any sincere seeker to take up and weigh. The fact that other people also pray has never moved it.
Want the full case, including the strongest arguments the critics make and every source? Read the in-depth version.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Testimony & Spiritual Witness," no. 1, p. 75. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Testimony & Spiritual Witness," no. 2, pp. 75-76. The four parallel testimonies — LDS, FLDS, RLDS, LDCJC — are presented as coming from "every major religion." All four are in fact from Restoration splinter groups that share scripture, share Joseph Smith as foundational prophet, and disagree only about post-1844 succession authority. ↩︎ ↩︎
The doctrinal anchors for the Light of Christ: Moroni 7:16 ("the Spirit of Christ is given to every man, that he may know good from evil"); D&C 84:46-48 ("the Spirit giveth light to every man that cometh into the world"); D&C 88:6-13 (the Light of Christ "is in all things, and is through all things, and is round about all things"); John 1:9 ("the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world"). ↩︎
Pew Research Center, "Spirituality Among Americans," December 7, 2023. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2023/12/07/spirituality-among-americans/. Headline findings: 70% of US adults consider themselves "spiritual," 81% acknowledge "something spiritual beyond the natural world," 45% report "a sudden feeling of connection with something from beyond this world." ↩︎
First Presidency Statement, "God's Love for All Mankind," February 15, 1978, signed by Spencer W. Kimball, N. Eldon Tanner, and Marion G. Romney. Sent to mission presidents in non-Christian-majority countries. The full text is held in the Church History Library catalog (https://catalog.churchofjesuschrist.org/assets?id=06d52821-9342-4f20-9cb3-358e6f8c8bfa) and is reproduced in BYU-Idaho archives at https://archives.byui.edu/s/public/page/1978-statement-god-love-for-all-mankind. The statement reads in part: "The great religious leaders of the world such as Mohammed, Confucius, and the Reformers, as well as philosophers including Socrates, Plato, and others, received a portion of God's light. Moral truths were given to them by God to enlighten whole nations and to bring a higher level of understanding to individuals…We believe that God has given and will give to all peoples sufficient knowledge to help them on their way to eternal salvation, either in this life or in the life to come." ↩︎
"Mormonism and Other Religions / Spiritual Witnesses," FAIR. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Mormonism_and_other_religions/Spiritual_witnesses. Develops the LDS doctrinal framework for cross-religious spiritual experience: the eight-category interpretive matrix, the fulness-of-light spectrum, the cognitive-distance theodicy, and the soteriological inclusivism that responds to the .2% efficiency statistic. ↩︎
"Holy Ghost / Latter-day Saint Epistemology," FAIR. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Holy_Ghost/_Latter-day_Saint_Epistemology. Develops the model in which reason / empirical evidence / spiritual witness work together, with reason and study preparing the ground for spiritual confirmation. ↩︎
The framework's correction comes at the institutional level, not the individual one: through subsequent revelation, prophetic course-correction, and the slow unfolding of doctrinal development across decades. The Latter-day Saint receiving a confirmation today of a contemporary teaching is in the same epistemic position the 19th-century Latter-day Saint was in receiving a confirmation of polygamy or the priesthood ban: she has the framework's checks (scripture, prophetic counsel, the cumulative case, the development of fruits), but she does not have a test that distinguishes "this confirmation will hold for two centuries" from "this confirmation will be revised in fifty years." A Latter-day Saint whose testimony rests on the deepest layer is in a stronger position than one whose testimony rests on every specific contemporary doctrinal formulation. The framework's narrower claims about specific institutional teachings at specific moments are more contingent than its claims about the deepest layer. ↩︎
John W. Welch, "How Long Did It Take Joseph Smith to Translate the Book of Mormon?" Ensign, January 1988, calculates the dictation phase at "sixty-five or fewer working days" (mid-April through late June 1829). See also John W. Welch, "Timing the Translation of the Book of Mormon: 'Days [and Hours] Never to Be Forgotten,'" BYU Studies Quarterly 57, no. 4 (2018): 11-50, refining the estimate to "not many more than the equivalent of about 65 actual working days." The broader period of the Book of Mormon's coming forth — from the 1823 Moroni visitation, through the lost 116 pages and other events, to the completed dictation in 1829 — extends across several years and remains debated. Royal Skousen's Critical Text Project has documented the dictation in detail; see Royal Skousen, ed., The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), Editor's Preface. The full case for the Book of Mormon's coming-forth is engaged in the Book of Mormon Translation section of this site, including the dictation-window debate and critical responses. ↩︎