Testimony & Spiritual Witnesses
A Latter-day Saint kneels and feels the witness settle in. So does a Catholic at Mass, a Pentecostal mid-shout, a Muslim rising from prayer. From the inside the experiences can be indistinguishable, the same warmth, the same certainty, the same sense of having been answered. If that is all a testimony amounts to, then four people with four incompatible religions are all equally sure, and the feeling cannot be telling any of them the truth. So what is a Latter-day Saint's witness worth that a sincere believer in another faith doesn't already have?
The question is fair, and old, and serious philosophers have worked on it for more than a century under the heading "the problem of religious diversity," the puzzle of how a private experience of God can settle a public claim when believers in rival faiths report the same experience. The CES Letter raises it. Then it answers a different one, because the testimony it sets out to refute is not the one the scriptures describe.
The section is built on a single premise: that Latter-day Saint epistemology reduces to one move, pray about it and trust whatever feeling comes back. Three epigraphs prime the reader before the first argument arrives, a psychotherapist's "Feelings Aren't Facts," a Church-owned ad agency boasting that it sells through "HeartSell," and a FairMormon line conceding that the Holy Spirit testifies "through feelings."[1] Then the numbered exhibits arrive, each aimed at that one premise. Every religion reports the same confirmation. A beloved General Authority moved congregations to tears with war stories he later admitted he had invented. You felt the Spirit at a violent war film and again at a children's cartoon.[2] Against a testimony that is nothing but a feeling, every one of those hits home.
The trouble is the target. The scriptures ask for something slower and harder than a feeling, and the section never engages it.
The method the section skips
Start where Oliver Cowdery started, by trying to skip the work. Cowdery asked Joseph for the gift to translate and assumed the words would simply come; the answer that came back instead was a correction:
"Behold, you have not understood; you have supposed that I would give it unto you, when you took no thought save it was to ask me. But, behold, I say unto you, that you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right… But if it be not right you shall have no such feelings, but you shall have a stupor of thought that shall cause you to forget the thing which is wrong."[3]
That correction dismantles the caricature in two strokes. The thinking comes first, ahead of the confirmation, not in place of it (D&C 9:7-9).
And the revelation builds in a way to be told no. When the proposed answer is wrong, the seeker is promised "a stupor of thought," a deliberate non-signal, which means the method can return a negative as readily as a yes. A process that only ever says yes is the one the critics describe. The scriptural one is wired to disappoint you when you are wrong, and Latter-day Saints do report it doing so: missionaries who decide against a plan, investigators who conclude the Church is not for them.
Revelation runs through two channels at once, not one. It comes "in your mind and in your heart" (D&C 8:2-3), reason and feeling checking each other, the opposite of a feeling trusted on contact.
Moroni's promise is usually shortened to "pray and you'll feel it," but it sets seven conditions, and the short version quietly drops the decisive one: real intent, a commitment to act on the answer even when acting will cost something (Moroni 10:3-5). A seeker who has resolved in advance to obey whatever comes is screened differently from one fishing for a feeling to confirm a choice already made. Alma frames the whole enterprise as an experiment: plant the seed, tend it, and watch over time whether it grows, judging it by the fruit it bears rather than by the first warm moment in the soil (Alma 32). Years of that is a skill, developed and tested, not the impulse the section keeps knocking down.
Hold the two side by side and the exhibits start to miss. A spike of feeling at a war film or a cartoon is real, and no one in this framework needs to pretend it isn't, but a moment of theater emotion was never the thing the scriptures pointed to. It skips the studying out, the negative signal, the obeying intent, and the years of watching for fruit. The section scores its hits against the move it assigns to Latter-day Saints, not the one they are actually taught to make.
The Church's own leaders draw the line in the very places the CES Letter quotes them. Boyd K. Packer's "The Candle of the Lord," cited in the section for a single sentence about mistaking emotion for the Spirit, frames that sentence as the setup for a talk about discernment: "A testimony is not thrust upon you; a testimony grows," he writes, the way a person grows taller, "we hardly know it happens because it comes by growth."[4] Distinguishing the Spirit from emotion is, in his account, a skill that develops over time, the opposite of the position the section has him defending.
What the doctrine already predicts
So when the CES Letter lines up four nearly identical testimonies, a Latter-day Saint, a member of the FLDS, an RLDS member, and another splinter group, each declaring through the same words that their church is the one true church, the lineup proves less than it looks. All four groups already share the Book of Mormon, a point the article on these competing spiritual claims takes up directly. But the deeper answer is doctrinal, and the section never touches it.
Latter-day Saint theology teaches that the Light of Christ reaches everyone, by design:
"For behold, the Spirit of Christ is given to every man, that he may know good from evil; wherefore, I show unto you the way to judge; for every thing which inviteth to do good, and to persuade to believe in Christ, is sent forth by the power and gift of Christ; wherefore ye may know with a perfect knowledge it is of God." (Moroni 7:16)
Every person, in every tradition, has real access to God's influence. A Catholic moved to tears at Mass and a Sufi lost in devotion are not anomalies the doctrine has to explain away. They are what it predicts. In 1978 the First Presidency said as much in writing, teaching that "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."[5] The cross-religious experience the CES Letter offers as a refutation is something Latter-day Saint scripture asserted first and built into its account of how God deals with the whole human family.
What that universal light does not do is settle a specific historical claim, whether a particular man was a prophet, whether a particular record is ancient. The Light of Christ is the broad, ambient conscience given to all; the gift of the Holy Ghost, received through covenant, is the narrower channel that testifies of particular truths.[6] For the specific question, the scriptures describe that further and more particular witness, reached through the studied, intentional, fruit-tested process above, not the diffuse warmth available to everyone. Flattening all spiritual experience into one undifferentiated category is the move that makes the argument run, and it is the exact move the doctrine refuses to make.
The exhibits up close
None of which means discernment never fails. The section presses two concrete exhibits, and in their strongest form both are worth pausing on rather than waving off.
The sharpest is Paul H. Dunn, a popular General Authority who for two decades told gripping stories of wartime combat and a near-miss professional baseball career, then admitted in a 1991 open letter that he had invented much of it:
"I confess that I have not always been accurate in my public talks and writings. Furthermore, I have indulged in other activities inconsistent with the high and sacred office which I have held... [Church authorities] have censured me and placed a heavy penalty upon me."[7]
Members really did feel something hearing those stories before anyone knew they were false. The steelman writes itself: if the Spirit confirmed Dunn's talks and the talks were fabricated, the Spirit confirmed a lie. The faithful reply is not to deny the feeling but to ask what it was confirming. A spiritual response to the courage, sacrifice, and faith carried inside a story is not the same as a notarized verdict on the story's biographical details, any more than weeping at the parable of the Prodigal Son certifies that a literal younger son once squandered a literal inheritance.[8]
That distinction carries a real cost, since members in the moment could not have known which details were invented, and the reliability of spiritual witnesses article names that residue rather than minimizing it. But the scriptures presuppose exactly this hazard rather than denying it: "try the spirits whether they are of God" (1 John 4:1) is a command that makes sense only if mistaking emotion for revelation is a live risk.
The other named exhibit is the revelation that sent Joseph's associates to Canada to sell the Book of Mormon copyright, a trip that returned with no buyer. For decades the only source was David Whitmer, writing in 1887, fifty-seven years after the fact and forty-nine years after his excommunication, and he reported it as a flat failure. Then in 2009 the original manuscript of the revelation was published, and the operative clause turned out to be conditional:
"I grant unto my servant a privilege that he may sell a copyright through you — speaking after the manner of men — for the four provinces, if the people harden not their hearts against the enticings of my spirit and my word; for behold, it lieth in themselves to their condemnation or to their salvation."[9]
The condition was in the text from the start, not added later as damage control. Hiram Page, who actually went on the trip and wrote in 1848, thirty-nine years before Whitmer, independently confirmed the same conditional: "We were to go to Kingston where we were to sell [a copyright] if they would not harden their hearts; but when we got there, there was no purchaser."[10] An eyewitness who was present, writing decades earlier, says the sale was always conditional and that he came home with added respect for Joseph. The CES Letter quotes only the later, secondhand, hostile source. The full documentary picture is traced in the article on failed revelations.
What the witness is actually asked to confirm
Strip the exhibits away and the contest was never really about whether other people have spiritual experiences. They plainly do, and the doctrine said so first. The contest is over the method, and over what the method is pointed at.
A Catholic praying about Catholic doctrine through Catholic ritual is testing something different from a Latter-day Saint praying about the Book of Mormon. The Catholic Catechism does not claim to be a translated ancient record. The Book of Mormon does, and that claim has a structure most religious tests lack: a falsification condition.
The book is either an authentic ancient record brought forth by miraculous means or it is something else, a fraud, a hallucination, a product of one frontier imagination. The spiritual witness has to fall on one side of that, confirming a specific document, with specific claims about its own origin, open to study and to two centuries of scrutiny.
That reframes every exhibit in the section. A feeling can be engineered in a darkened theater in ninety minutes, and the CES Letter is right that such a feeling proves nothing. But the witness the scriptures describe is not that feeling. It is the slower verdict that settles on a particular text after a question has been studied out, asked with the intent to obey, weighed in mind against heart, and watched across the long fruits of a faithful life. The four testimonies the CES Letter lined up against each other are telling in a way it does not notice: all four groups kept the Book of Mormon. The thing the witness was reaching for survived the disagreement that was supposed to discredit it.
None of this resolves into a tidy verdict, and the section does not pretend every question here is closed. Discernment can fail; honest people have mistaken emotion for revelation; the Church's own history includes confirmations of things later set right. What holds firm, when the question gets hard, is the object the whole argument began by mischaracterizing. Not a feeling about a book, but the book itself: an actual record with a falsification condition built into it, open to study and to two centuries of scrutiny.[11] A testimony engineered in an evening is one thing. A life quietly reoriented for decades, in answer to a question worked through with care and anchored to a text that keeps refusing to dissolve, is a different order of evidence. It is that second thing the section set out to defeat, and it spends its pages on the first.
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). ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 9:7-9. Given to Oliver Cowdery during his unsuccessful attempt to translate. ↩︎
Boyd K. Packer, "The Candle of the Lord," Ensign, January 1983. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1983/01/the-candle-of-the-lord. The full talk includes the salt-tasting analogy (atheists can verbally describe but not experientially know spiritual realities), the natural-man-receiveth-not framing (1 Cor. 2:14), the warning against false spirits, the testimony-grows-by-growth model, and the two-step process of cognitive engagement followed by experiential confirmation. ↩︎
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." ↩︎
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"). ↩︎
"Elder Dunn Offers Apology for Errors, Admits Censure," Deseret News, October 27, 1991. https://www.deseret.com/1991/10/27/18948334/elder-dunn-offers-apology-for-errors-admits-censure/. The Deseret News reporting on Dunn's October 26, 1991 Church News open letter. Exact wording of the apology: "I confess that I have not always been accurate in my public talks and writings. Furthermore, I have indulged in other activities inconsistent with the high and sacred office which I have held… [Church authorities] have censured me and placed a heavy penalty upon me." Don LeFevre, Church spokesman, declined to disclose the penalty: "an internal matter, and we don't discuss such matters" publicly. The article also confirms Dunn's emeritus status was effective October 1, 1989, sixteen months before the Arizona Republic exposé in February 1991. ↩︎
Sarah Allen, "The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 41," FAIR Blog, January 14, 2022. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/blog/2022/01/14/41. The most directly on-topic Latter-day Saint response to the Dunn portion of the CES Letter. Core argument: the Spirit testifies to the truth of gospel principles embedded in narratives, not to biographical specifics. Cites Michael Ash: "The Spirit testifies to the truth of those things which ultimately lead people to God, not to ancillary details — fictional, embellished, or misremembered — which serve as mere vehicles for the larger message." ↩︎
"Revelation, circa Early 1830," Revelation Book 1, pp. 30-31, Joseph Smith Papers. First published in Robin Scott Jensen, Robert J. Woodford, and Steven C. Harper, eds., Revelations and Translations: Manuscript Revelation Books, Facsimile Edition, vol. 1 (Salt Lake City: Church Historian's Press, 2009). The conditional clause ("if the people harden not their hearts") is in the 1830 manuscript text, not added later. https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/revelation-circa-early-1830/1 ↩︎
Hiram Page to William McLellin, February 2, 1848. Published transcription in Larry E. Morris, "'I Should Have an Eye Single to the Glory of God': Joseph Smith's Account of the Angel and the Plates," FARMS Review 17, no. 1 (2005): 11-82. Page, who participated in the Canadian copyright trip, confirmed the conditional clause ("if they would not harden their hearts") and described returning with "added respect" for Joseph's prophetic role. (Note: the FARMS Review article URL at scholarlypublishingcollective.org may be paywalled for unauthenticated readers; the print citation is the citation of record. The article is also accessible through institutional library subscriptions.) ↩︎
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. ↩︎