“If anyone is inclined to be contentious, we have no such practice, nor do the churches of God” (1 Cor 11:16).

The word Paul uses for “contentious” is philoneikos, a lover of strife. If you squint, you’ll see the cousin of a word you already know but didn’t realize it: nikē, victory. That’s the name of the goddess Nike, after whom a certain sportswear company named itself, swoosh and all. It evokes winning, trophies, standing on the podium, your opponent defeated and demoralized, etc.

I don’t want to bury the lede: contention is idolatry because it’s a performance sacrificed to impress Nike.

I see a growing number of online apologists making that sacrifice. Evangelicals do it all the time, and it’s lamentably annoying to me. Sometimes I call it out, usually in private over a DM. On rare occasions, I’m slandered as a result, or blocked, and I have to watch from afar as people—well, let’s be real: middle-aged men—drag our shared faith through the mud to dunk on outsiders, thinking they’re pleasing God. My own tradition has plenty of friends of Nike, but that’s not what this essay is about.

I’m especially grieved to see it among Latter-day Saint apologists, because they have so much more to lose. They’ve inherited a birthright, i.e., nearly two centuries of goodwill, earned by Saints who endured mockery and violence and answered with gentleness and kindness. Some of their online defenders are squandering it to please Nike, not their Heavenly Father.

Who this is about

The average Latter-day Saint read this essay can relax, and so can every Latter-day Saint friend and colleague of mine. Nothing you’re about to read is aimed at you. Not a single of one you was on my mind when writing, even LDS apologists I’m friends with. I respect you a lot. You guys and gals know who you are, and I love you! I’d take your company over most people’s any day of the week.

My concern here is some in your Church’s unofficial, unsanctioned digital defense department, the chronically online ‘guardians’ of the LDS castle. I suspect you know who they are, too.

Just to be extra clear here, my experience with Latter-day Saints has been overwhelmingly positive. They’re gentle and warm, gracious, and humble. They’ve gone above and beyond to make me feel welcome and comfortable in their homes, their worship spaces, their classrooms. Some have even offered me coffee; to me, a Gentile, they became as Gentiles.

I’ve shared deeply spiritual experiences with Latter-day Saints. It’s hard not to when you’re reading the Gospels in the Garden of Gethsemane with forty of them. Latter-day Saints listen to me with real empathy, encouraged me through family issues, and made sacrifices for me to make me feel included.

In my experience, they’ve treated me in a way I can only call Christlike. I can’t hide that or shy away from it because it’s true, and it’s one of the things I most admire about them.

That’s exactly why the online apologetics world is so jarring. When I step away from a Latter-day Saint living room into a Latter-day Saint comment section, it feels like I’ve crossed into another country.

The religion of mild persuasion

You may know that I’m currently finishing a book, tentatively titled Mapping Early Mormonism. It’s why I’ve been less active on Substack because I’m trying to get the book across the finish line.

Anyway, back in September, I finished one of the hardest chapters I’ve written on Latter-day Saint history. The Missouri period is difficult to look at, let alone write about.

I found a story in that time period, though, that I love.

In December 1838, Joseph Smith was locked in the lower room of the jail at Liberty, Missouri. Fourteen feet square, a six-foot ceiling, half sunk below ground. He was there through the winter.

(That’s not what I love, you weirdo. Just keep reading.)

While he sat there, his people were exiled from the state. Governor Lilburn Boggs had ordered that the Mormons be exterminated or driven from Missouri, and so they went, across the Mississippi into Illinois. Three days after that order, a militia rode up on a settlement at Shoal Creek and opened fire. Seventeen died at Haun’s Mill. An excerpt from the book:

The killing included children. When nine-year-old Charles Merrick ran for his life, he was shot and killed. Ten-year-old Sardis Smith—Amanda’s son—didn’t run. Instead, he hid beneath the blacksmith’s bellows, and begged for his life. The mob had already killed his father, Warren Smith (no relation to Joseph), and wounded his brother. “Kill him,” one of the men shouted, “he is the son of a damned Mormon.” A raider leveled his gun and blew off a portion of the boy’s head as he “fell dead by the side of his father.” When some of the vigilantes objected, another retorted, “Damn the difference! Nits make lice!” It was the same sort of thing White Americans said to justify killing Native children. The mob dispersed in song. “God d—n God, God d—n Jesus Christ,” they sung. “God d—n, the God d—n Mormons! we have sent them to hell.”

That was October 30, 1838. Today, as I publish this, marks 188 years.

Like I said, one of the hardest chapters I’ve written.

The story continues. Joseph escaped custody in April, and by winter he was in Washington, pleading with the federal government to make Missouri answer for what the Saints had experienced. He got an audience with President Van Buren, but was told that, though the Mormons’ cause was just, nevertheless nothing could be done for them. Van Buren couldn’t afford to lose Missouri support. Joseph stayed in the city anyway, working the Capitol and waiting.

That’s the man Matthew Davis went to hear preach.

Davis expected a fanatic. If anyone had earned the right to rage, it was Joseph Smith. Instead, Davis wrote to his wife, Mary, “There was no violence, no fury, no denunciation.” What he found looked to him “to be the religion of meekness, lowliness, and mild persuasion.”

“Throughout his whole address,” Davis observed, Joseph “displayed, strongly, a spirit of Charity and Forbearance.” In other words, he assumed the best about people who disagreed with him, and he declined to answer his critics in kind. He did this with the wounds of Missouri still fresh.

“Are. You. Kidding. Me.” were the words that floated through my head. After everything the Saints’ have been through and were going through, Joseph held it together long enough to present to the world calmness and meekness and mild persuasion.

That same year, Joseph wrote to his apostles: “Love is one of the leading characteristics of Deity, and ought to be manifested by those who aspire to be the Sons of God. A man filled with the love of God, is not content with blessing his family alone, but ranges through the world, anxious to bless the whole of the human family.”

That’s the inheritance I mentioned at the start. For two centuries, Latter-day Saints have endured mockery, suspicion, outright violence, and, by far and away, they’ve answered with kindness.

That goodwill is the Latter-day Saint birthright.

Squandering the birthright

Over the past couple of years, I’ve watched some Latter-day Saint apologists trade that birthright for a quick win, the way Esau traded his for lentil soup.

Esau was starving, so he sold his birthright to his brother for a single bowl of stew. Just a single meal. Sure, it filled him for an afternoon, but it cost him everything that was meant to last him for generations. The hunger for victory works the same way.

It wants to be fed now, and online it doesn’t have to wait too long. You post the dunk, the algorithm likes it, and within minutes, so does everyone else. The dopamine hit is real. Then, you’re back at the castle gate for another night of standing watch, confident that you’ve done something good for your community. The sense of accomplishment, even of manhood, can feel overwhelming in the moment, but it’s fleeting and shallow, and it costs far more than it’s worth.

The cost is a heart bent toward juvenile dunking and sneering and chest-thumping and scalp-hunting for lolz and likes. Mocking the Trinity, the creeds, etc. Snide pedantry, drive-by postings, gotcha clips cut to make someone look foolish. Reading the worst motives into every honest question and declaring victory before the other person has finished speaking Dry, cutting comments on essays they never bothered to open, posted after reading the title alone. I’ve personally experienced all this, and it’s mild by comparison. A friend had a meme made of him in which it appears he’s endorsing Nazism, made by an apologist who ranks highly (I’m told) among the leaders in the digital space, the kind younger apologists look up to.

I won’t name names, but you’ve seen it, I’m sure. I know I’m not the only one who has.

I can already hear the reply: “They started it.” Sure, oftentimes, they did. Evangelicals have given Latter-day Saints plenty of reasons to hit back, so I’m not finger-wagging here. But “he hit me first” is so childish. It’s what my seven-year-old says to excuse her misbehavior. But Christ didn’t give us an exception for when the other side throws the first punch. He told us to turn the other cheek, to bless those who curse us, and to do unto others as we’d have done unto us, not as others have already done unto us.

If you can’t obey the ABCs of the gospel, what makes you think you can defend its more advanced elements?

This is why, personally, when it comes to some scholars who claim a Christian faith, I can’t take their work seriously when their online personality is so mismatched from the Lord they’re claiming. If they can’t be trusted to treat a stranger with kindness in a comment section, I’m not sure why I should trust them with the doctrine of God.

Anyway, social media isn’t real life, but it shapes real life.

In 2025, Joe Rogan called Mormons “the nicest cult members” with evangelical apologist Wesley Huff sitting right across from him. I know Latter-day Saints winced at that, because they heard “cult,” and cult means “threat,” and threat means something has to be done about it. But, hear me out: I heard nicest. That reputation didn’t come cheap. It took generations of ordinary Saints paiding for it, day and day, insult after insult, blow after blow.

Again, I understand why some apologists have turned aggressive. The opposition toward Latter-day Saints is real and often ugly. I’m sure many of these apologists believe they’re protecting their people. I take them to be sincere.

But sincerity doesn’t settle the question of whom you claim to serve. Again, Jesus said to do unto others as you’d have them do unto you. Paul told the Colossians to walk in wisdom toward outsiders, and to let their speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt. He told Timothy that the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome—not should not but must not, it’s non-negotiable. The servant must be kind to everyone, correcting his or her opponents with gentleness. Paul told the Thessalonians to live quietly so they’d win the respect of outsiders. And Joseph Smith, under far worse pressure than any online critic can muster, practiced mild persuasion.

Look, fighting fire with fire just makes the fire larger, more destructive.

It pleases only one god: Nike.

The generational concern

Indeed, I’ve come to the opinion that these apologists believe they’re worshiping God and defending their Church. But they aren’t, not really. They’re kneeling at the feet of Nike.

And Nike has her own liturgy. If you want to please the goddess of victory, you have to win. And, if you have to win, you’ll do whatever it takes. You’ll clip the video to make your opponent look foolish. You’ll mock what she holds sacred. You’ll declare victory before he’s finished speaking. Every clever takedown and viral dunk is another offering laid on her altar.

But Nike is never satisfied, and she’ll always wants one more win.

Worse, it’s training a new generation of LDS digital defenders to go even farther.

One of my life mottos is simple: what leaders do in moderation, followers do in excess.

If the leading apologists in a movement are aggressive and unkind, even in moderation, a crop of younger apologists will follow them. They’ll want to impress you, the veteran LDS apologist, but also Nike, too. And they’ll do more than what they saw their favorite apologists do.

I bet that crop is already here, we just don’t know it yet, because they’re at the MTC or on their mission or in college. There are Gen Alpha Latter-day Saints in the wings right now consuming this content, and for many of them it’s the primary way they see their faith defended. They’re being trained to defend their Church in a way that would have been foreign to it for most of its existence.

Matthew Davis wouldn’t recognize it.

I don’t think Joseph would either.

So, if you will, some advice

Evangelicals, us first.

Don’t stoke the fire. A lot of what Latter-day Saints are reacting to is the mockery and misrepresentation that’s we’ve lobbed at them for generations. Too many of us still do. (To be clear, I’ve written elsewhere about what constitutes evangelical anti-Mormonism, and why I think it’s a real problem in our tradition.) When you see it from one of our own, call it out, privately first, and then publicly if it keeps up. Our credibility depends on being willing to correct our own before we ask anyone else to correct theirs.

And when it comes your way, don’t hit back. Everything I’ve said to Latter-day Saint apologists applies to us, too, and if anything, we should know better, since we’ve been on the giving end far longer.

My practical advice: Don’t reply to anonymous accounts. If someone seems worth a conversation, reach out privately, and do it gently. And don’t be afraid of the block and mute buttons. They’re liberating. There are LDS apologists—and some evangelical, frankly—I’d forgotten existed until someone sent me something of theirs. I’d blocked or muted them long ago. The less oxygen you give these guys, the better.

In fact, sabbath from social media. Sometimes, I just completely ignore socials for a day or two. It’s liberating, great for mental health. I use Freedom, because I still need my laptop to work. Check it out.

To Latter-day Saints who are discouraged by what they see but still want a strong man at the gate, I get it. You want to feel safe, but the cost is too high. The strong man at the gate is the first person outsiders meet. He’s the face of your city. Behind him is everything beautiful about it, e.g., kindness, meekness, gentleness, respect. That’s the life Jesus modeled and Paul commissioned us to live. If the man at the gate is a brawler, few will ever see what’s inside, and that’s a shame.

You also don’t have to follow these guys. “Police your own” is probably too strong a word, but the best way for any religious community to improve its apologetics is from the inside because insiders pull their own people back and point them toward the community’s values.

Is the spirit of contention a value in your religious community? That’s a stupid question; I know it’s not. But that’s not what’s being communicated to outsiders online through some of your apologist.

Remember, apologists are de facto representatives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whether you like it or not. It’s just reality. Yes, you might think your Church’s representatives are your General Authorities and the people who serve in official capacities. But to outsiders, they aren’t. Your average evangelical has no clue what a General Authority even is. They certainly don’t know General Conference exists, and even if they did, they wouldn’t tune in.

The people they do pay attention to, however, fall into three groups. First, your missionaries; second, the ordinary Latter-day Saints they meet at work, at school, and in their neighborhoods; and third, your digital apologists. The first two groups are great. They’re kind, patient, and empathetic.

It’s the third group that worries me.

“If anyone is inclined to be contentious, we have no such practice, nor do the churches of God” (1 Cor 11:16).

Don’t be friends of Nike. Be friends of the Lord Jesus, who said, “Blessed are the peacemakers.”

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Recently, an evangelical biblical scholar and apologist who occasionally engages Latter-day Saints and Mormonism was asked a question by a Latter-day Saint on his live YouTube channel, The Dividing Line:

What scholarship had he been keeping up with in the field of Mormon Studies?

The apologist, James White, didn’t name a specific book. Instead, he explained he didn’t feel the need to keep up with all the “minutiae” coming out of BYU, and felt it more important to follow the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve, since they’re the pinnacle of LDS doctrine. If you want to know what the Church teaches, pay attention to Church authorities. You don’t need the downstream material.

Fair enough, I suppose, but frankly, I was hoping for a more robust answer. I get this instinct, though. Latter-day Saints believe their prophet and apostles hold a unique authority to declare doctrine. White was, no doubt, right about that.

But imagine the argument in the inverse. Suppose a Latter-day Saint, who postures as an expert in evangelicalism, told an evangelical that he didn’t need to keep up with all the “minutiae” coming out of our seminaries and publishers to understand our faith because he could simply read the Bible alone. After all, among our most well-known doctrines is sola Scriptura, i.e., that the Holy Bible is our pinnacle earthly authority for all matters of faith and practice, and everything else is simply downstream.

We’d object, or, at least, I would. Had I the opportunity with that LDS apologist, I’d hand him Augustine’s Confessions and Calvin’s Institutes. I’d point him to Martin Luther, who shapes our understanding of Paul, and John Owen and Jonathan Edwards, who taught us to search our hearts. I’d give him the dogmatics of Herman Bavinck, B. B. Warfield’s work on Scripture, Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship, J. I. Packer’s Knowing God. I’d finally turn him toward evangelical works coming out of our seminaries and the Evangelical Theological Society and Zondervan, IVP, Baker, Eerdmans, etc.

Finally, I’d tell him that it’s not really possible to understand a faith tradition by reading only its source of authority, because you have to understand how its people receive it. Indeed, downstream is where tradition is lived.

A little later, I watched Jaxon Washburn—the Latter-day Saint who put the question to James White—talk about the exchange on an LDS YouTube channel called Ward Radio.

Around the 50:00 mark, the host said something that caught my attention. You can watch or listen to that moment here:

If the link didn’t work, here’s the host’s quote that I’m most interested in:

“Tomorrow, if he wanted to, Dallin H. Oaks [President of the LDS Church], Clark Gilbert [LDS Apostle responsible for Church education], could just shut down any department of BYU that they wanted to, and they thought was misbehaved.”

Now, granted, I don’t know if what the host claimed is actually true. It’s probably a little more involved than Oaks or Gilbert unilaterally shutting down an entire department on a random Friday afternoon. But the force of the point is clear and true, i.e., if the Church owns the institution where most of its theology would happen, then that theology exists at the pleasure of the Church’s leadership.

That’s something I’ve been chewing on for years now, and finally wanted to put my thoughts out there, because I think it affects the way the LDS Church does theology.

A Word About the Apologist

First, though, a word about James White, just to be perfectly clear.

I don’t know him. I’ve never interacted with him nor read his work nor do I follow his channel, but I’ve also been in enough live situations to know that one answer on the fly is such a small peek into someone’s life. I’ve already said I was disappointed by his answer, and I’ll leave it there.

But because I’ve seen Latter-day Saints dunk on White since the moment, I’d like to point out that he seems genuinely interested in LDS scholarship to the degree in which he’s able. He seems like he’s far more interested in textual criticism, so I thought it was cool how he mentioned paying to have Thomas Wayment’s New Testament translation leather-bound and gifted to the BYU scholar. I thought that was very generous act. We need more like it.

Still, to be frank, I think White fumbled the question, but the question itself got me thinking:

Was White’s answer due to a lack of commitment to research on his part, or was it due to a dearth of the material he’d expect to find as an evangelical scholar?

Perhaps it’s both, but part of the reason is the scarcity of LDS systematic theology. Here’s what I mean.

When it comes to Mormon Studies, there’s no shortage of reading. By “Mormon Studies,” I mean the scholarly study of the Latter-day Saint movement in all its branches, by scholars inside and outside the tradition. LDS scholars in history, philosophy, and scriptural studies are thriving. Mormon Studies is a healthy, growing field in the study of religion. Any non-Latter-day Saint who claims expertise in Mormonism should be reading in these areas. If you’re not, then you shouldn’t be considered having expertise in that field. We evangelicals wouldn’t consider a Latter-day Saint an expert in evangelicalism if she’d never read Carl F. H. Henry, George Marsden, Nathan Hatch, Carl Trueman, Thomas Kidd, Nancy Pearcey, or newer voices like Gavin Ortlund and Rebecca McLaughlin.

That’s the standard we’d apply to ourselves, so, do unto others.

Still, I think White’s answer makes more sense once you look at theology, in specific. Theology is one area where I’ve found it hard to find quality work. I can hop on the Church’s website and get official doctrine, and there are great resources explaining that doctrine. What’s harder to find is the next level, i.e., scholars taking a doctrine and working it out at length, testing it against objections, building on what others have written before them, toying with new ideas, etc.

I’m not saying such work doesn’t exist, but it certainly doesn’t exists in the quantity and quality that traditional Christians—Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestants—are accustomed to.

I’m thinking about the best theological works I’ve read recently. Thomas Joseph White, a Dominican, wrote an excellent treaties on The Trinity: On the Nature and Mystery of the One God (Catholic University of America Press). I really enjoyed Baptist theologian Channing Crisler’s 40 Questions About the Atonement (Kregel Academic). I’m presently reading Carl Trueman’s (a Reformed historian and theologian) Classical Theology for the Modern Mind (Crossway). Note how these authors represent three different traditions looking at three different doctrines. Each book takes a single doctrine and works it out carefully for the church, standing on centuries of prior work.

I suspect that’s part of why the apologist didn’t name a book. The kind of work an evangelical theologian would naturally want to read, like systematic theologies and theological monographs, is hard to find in the LDS tradition. The obvious exception is Grant Underwood’s Latter-day Saint Theology among Christian Theologies (Eerdmans, 2025), but more on that below.

For now, I’d like to make the observation that Latter-day Saints don’t really have the same kind of theological guild that traditional Christianity enjoys.

Why is that?

Traditional Christianies all have professional theological guilds. They have professional theologians who spend their entire careers on the Trinity, the atonement, the sacraments, etc. They publish monographs, supervise doctoral students, debate at scholarly conferences, and critique each other’s work in academic journals. They gather in organizations like the Catholic Theological Society of America, the Evangelical Theological Society, and the Orthodox Theological Society in America, and they publish in journals like Theological Studies, the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, and St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly.

Latter-day Saints have produced systematic theologians, too, e.g., James Talmage, Orson Pratt, B. H. Roberts, Bruce R. McConkie. But there’s no LDS equivalent to Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, Calvin’s Institutes, or Barth’s Church Dogmatics. The closest I can think of is Talmage’s Jesus the Christ and Articles of Faith, but those are far more devotional than dogmatics, or what we evangelicals call applied or practical theology. It’s DMin, not PhD, content.

So, why hasn’t the LDS tradition developed a comparable guild of professional theologians?

I see two reasons for this.

First, the nature of revelation in LDS thought.

In traditions with settled creeds and canons, and without a living prophet, theologians work within relatively stable doctrinal frameworks. There are boundaries that won’t—can’t—move (e.g. creation ex nihilo, the Trinity, fixed canon), so the ‘sandbox’ in which to play is clearly defined. Theologians can debate theological meaning and implications, but they don’t expect new prophetic revelation to reshape the doctrinal framework itself.

Latter-day Saints, though, understand doctrine differently. God reveals it through a living prophet, and prophetic teaching is the authoritative means by which doctrine is clarified, applied, or illuminated in response to the Church’s needs. Latter-day Saints see this as one of their tradition’s great strengths.

It does, in my opinion, come with a serious weakness, though.

Think about what a living prophet means for a theologian. Imagine a Latter-day Saint scholar who devotes her career to eternal progression, or eternal families, or a particular element of the temple endowment. She spends twenty years on it and writes the definitive study. Then, prophetic teaching clarifies or reframes the doctrine on a random Saturday session of General Conference. What happens to her work?

It doesn’t disappear, of course, but it’s no longer relevant to present belief and practices. Her life’s work, as valuable is it is, is now as an element of LDS historical theology. Her books and articles now describe what Latter-day Saints once believed and how they reasoned about it. That’s valuable, obviously, but it’s also a different kind of book from the one she wrote.

This is, in my opinion, one reason why so many Latter-day Saint intellectuals are drawn to other fields, e.g., history, philosophy, scriptural studies, sociology, etc.

Systematic theology needs a reasonably stable object on which construct, critique, revise, and coalesce. Continuing revelation makes (theoretically) nearly every theological object movable. As long as new revelation remains possible, no LDS systematic theology can claim the settled, guild-shaped authority that theology has in traditional Christianity.

This may be one reason the fields I mentioned above are thriving. Again, Latter-day Saint intellectuals seem drawn to history, philosophy, scriptural studies, and sociology, where the object of study holds still, at least much more still relative to theology. It’s also why Underwood’s choice to write a comparative work is telling.

In my forthcoming review of his Latter-day Saint Theology Among Christian Theologies (Dialogue, Winter 2026), I noted how he sidesteps this problem. He doesn’t write a systematic theology of Mormonism; rather he writes a systematic theology of Christianity and juxtaposes Latter-day Saint next to it. Underwood need the stable framework that the Christian theological tradition provides before mapping LDS theology against it.

Now, granted, traditions change course. Catholic doctrine develops occasionally—e.g., the formal definition of Mary’s immaculate conception in 1854—and Protestants revise their confessions or Statements of Faith, but those changes tend to come slowly and are typically framed as continuity with what came before. In the Latter-day Saint tradition, however, a single revelation can reorder a teaching rather quickly. That’s a hard foundation for a theology career, or, better, that’s hardly a foundation for a theological career.

* And, to be fair, the LDS tradition is still very young. As someone pointed out to me after this essay was published, when measured against early Christianity, Latter-day Saints are still more than a century away from their Nicaea. That’s very true, but, in the end, I don’t think age alone explains the gap. If I’ve done the math correctly, at roughly the age the LDS Church is now, Christianity already had Irenaeus behind it and Origen’s On First Principles, arguably the first attempt at a Christian systematic theology, though, admittedly, only barely.

In thinking about it, thought, I’m not sure the comparison accounts for the difference in resources. Early Christians copied their texts by hand, often under persecution, with no universities and no body of Christian theology to build on. Joseph Smith’s movement, however, was born with printing presses and newspapers and 18 centuries of Christian theological method. If anything, we might expect a Latter-day Saint guild to form faster, not slower.

So, yes, the youngness of the LDS Church explains some of the gap, but not all of it. *

Anyway, back to the prophetic environment in which the LDS theologian thinks and writes. I suspect this is part of why so much of the best LDS theological work happens provisionally or exploratorily, e.g., venues like the Mormon Theology Seminar does excellent work. Much of it is offered with humility and held open to revision. That’s admirable. Volumes on LDS theology also carry the sense of openness. Off the top of my head, I can see titles with the words exploring and wrestling and development in them. The title Mormon Doctrine—concrete, declarative—has, in my opinion, largely fallen by the wayside.

Again, not a critique, just an observation.

Second, the Structure of the LDS Church

The second reason has to do with ecclesiology. I’ve made this point for years, and I was glad to hear it raised in the Ward Radio conversation so frankly.

The host’s point was rather simple: the senior leaders of the LDS Church could, it they wanted to, shut down any department at BYU tomorrow. No scholarly class directs the priesthood because authority runs from the top down. BYU faculty have something called tenure, but, as the conversation noted, it’s really a form of continuing employment status. The LDS Church owns the university.

To be clear, I don’t say that as a complaint. I think a private institution is private for a reason, so the Church has every right to govern its own school. Plenty of evangelical schools and seminaries work the same way. It does, however, shape what a theological guild needs to survive.

I think of how, in 1986, Roman Catholic scholar Charles Curran lost his canonical mission to teach theology at the Catholic University of America, but he eventually landed at Southern Methodist University. Catholic theology lives in hundreds of institutions around the world. Evangelicals have that kind of plurality, too. When one seminary closes a program, another picks it up. If a scholar loses a post, there are other places for her to go. I’ve seen this happen numerous times before.

But the LDS Church has only one primary institution for this kind of work, and the Church owns it. If a department closed, there wouldn’t be a comparable institution ready to carry its work forward, at least not ‘officially’ or in formal association with the LDS Church. One might look to the Institutes, but be real—those are also under the jurisdiction of the Church Educational System. They’re also teaching, not research, institutions.

Mormon Studies programs at other universities matter a great deal here. They do vital work, and they aren’t subject to the Church in the same way. These are, in many ways, the primary free-standing theological think-tanks for LDS thought.

Where to Start Reading

So, back to the question the apologist was asked by the Latter-day Saint:

If the Church lacks a theological guild in the way evangelicals know it, that’s all the more reason to read the scholars it does have.

Without a guild, it’s tempting to lean on whatever’s closest. I’ve done it myself, usually with one of three sources.

First, with lay conversation, especially interfaith dialogue. My Latter-day Saint friends have taught me more about lived faith than any book, but no one person speaks for a whole tradition, evangelicals included. I’ve also found opinions among LDS to be dynamic, so having scholarly synthesis is grounding.

Second, older material. Books age, mine included. My 40 Questions About Mormonism will need updating someday. But, if we lean on older works, we risk describing a Church that has moved on.

Third, online content, this Substack included. Obviously, digital content and interactions make good doorways into deeper reading, but it can’t replace that reading. You actually have to do the deeper reading.

I’ve found that Latter-day Saint scholars do their best and most careful thinking in print, whether published through Oxford University Press or in BYU Studies, i.e., whether correlated or not. And that’s where we see how Latter-day Saints receive their prophets’ teaching.

Downstream, again, is where tradition is lived.

So, as a practical step, let me recommend three books I’ve enjoyed recently, whether within Mormon Studies or from LDS scholars. There are others, but these are where I’d start.

Grant Underwood, Latter-day Saint Theology among Christian Theologies (Eerdmans, 2025). Underwood is a believing Latter-day Saint and a historian. Here he places Latter-day Saint thought alongside the main currents of Christian theology. He writes for those of us outside his tradition, and he does it carefully and fairly. My review in Dialogue forthcoming.

John G. Turner, Joseph Smith: The Rise and Fall of an American Prophet (Yale, 2025). Turner is a historian at George Mason University, and he isn’t a Latter-day Saint. His biography is careful and readable. Latter-day Saint reviewers haven’t agreed with all of it, but they’ve taken it seriously. My review in JETS forthcoming.

Lincoln H. Blumell, Lady Eclecte: The Lost Woman of the New Testament (Fortress, 2025). Blumell is a LDS scholar at BYU and a serious papyrologist (in 2015, he identified a fourth-century NT papyrus). In Lady Eclecte, he makes a manuscript-based case that the “elect lady” of 2 John was a real woman named Eclecte. It’s very interesting. Speaking of biblical studies, take a cue from James White and pick up a copy of Thomas Wayment’s NT translation.

Also, be on the look out for Jonathan Stapley and Spencer McBride’s Inside the Temple: What Latter-day Saints Do in Their Most Sacred Spaces (Eerdmans, spring 2027). I had the privilege of reading a pre-pub copy, and am very excited to see it in print.

Finally, obviously, 40 Questions About Mormonism. ;)

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An earlier edition made the connection between Joseph Smith and John Calvin too strongly. Thanks to feedback from Mack Werner, I have revised the essay to more carefully make the argument.

On August 18, 1833, Joseph Smith wrote to leaders of the Church of Christ in Jackson County, Missouri.

Earlier that month, news had reached him of the mob violence there in late July. Anti-Mormons destroyed the Latter-day Saint printing office in Independence, and tarred and feathered one of their leaders. By the time Joseph learned of all this, the persecuted Saints had already agreed to leave by the following year. Sadly, things would only get worse from there.

Their pain and departure was hard to accept for Joseph. His people were, after all, turning away from the New Jerusalem he believed God, via the mouth of a living prophet in the End Times, commanded them to build.

No wonder Joseph opened his letter with a prayer:

O thou disposer of all Events, thou dispencer of all good! in the name of Jesus Christ I ask thee to inspire my heart.1

I came across this moment while doing some research for a project on Mormon history. I immediately noticed the phrase “dispence of all good” as unoriginal to Joseph Smith.

I’d first come across it in John Calvin’s Institutes, his chapter “Of Prayer,” in which he describes God “the sovereign disposer of all good” (III.20.1).

It means that every good thing—every mercy, every provision, every laugh, every cool breeze on a hot summer’s day—all of it has its origin in God’s will, and comes to us by His hand at His good pleasure. “Disposer” sounds odd, but bear in mind the older sense of the word, i.e., not one who discards, but one who arranges or allots. God, then, is the arranger and distributor of all good things, the sovereign source from whom every gift flows.

For Calvin, this confession is the ground of prayer itself, because God alone gives, and we are the ones who ask. And it just so happens that Joseph Smith began his prayer with an extremely similiar phrase.

Where Calvin wrote “sovereign,” Joseph wrote “disposer of all Events.”

Where Calvin wrote “disposer of all good,” Joseph wrote “dispencer of all good.”

Well, technically, Calvin didn’t write “disposer” at all. He wrote bonorum omnium dominum ac largitorem, “the Lord and giver of all good things.” Largitor means a giver, a bestower, one who grants generously. It was his popular English translator, Henry Beveridge, who in 1845 rendered largitor as “disposer.”

Beveridge published his translation in 1845, twelve years after Joseph wrote his letter. Yet, the phrase “disposer of all good” was hardly a rare at the time. By the 1830s, it was ordinary providential English. As one reader pointed out, when John Quincy Adams opened his 1825 annual message to Congress, he gave thanks to “the Omnipotent Disposer of All Good.” The words also turn up in sermons and prayers across the young republic.

None of this was distinctively Calvinist, but it was thoroughly biblical, and every Protestant tradition held it. The taproot, I think, is the book of James: “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights” (James 1:17). Calvin’s largitor, Beveridge’s disposer, the founders’ providential thanks, and Joseph’s prayer all draw from that same source. God is the giver of all good, which is among the least controversial confessions of the Christian faith.

Set aside the words for a moment to notice the structure, because it’s the same for both Joseph and Calvin. Joseph wrote, “Disposer of all Events,” so God is soverign over everything that happens. Then, he wrote “Dispencer of all good,” which means God gives whatever is good.

God is great, God is good.

That’s the same two-step Calvin took, as did countless Christians before him. In fact, the idea—God as the disposer of all good—had by 1833 become part of the ordinary piety of Anglo-American Protestantism, its sermons and prayers and hymnals, and part of the very grammar with which a person addressed God in a prayerful moment of grief. And when Joseph, under the weight of news he could barely stand beneath, began his prayer, this is the phrase that showed up first.

Wild, right?

At least, it was a bit jarring to me.

I think that’s because—and maybe I’m not alone—I tend to read Joseph as a figure cleanly severed from what came before him. I know he’s not; I know that for a fact.

But still, it seems to be my default mode Joseph Smith.

Perhaps the First Vision is the reason? The narrative frames it that way, anyway. Two personages—God the Father and Jesus Christ—telling a fourteen-year-old boy that the Christian creeds are an abomination, forbidding him from formally associating with any church. For many Latter-day Saints I’ve spoken with or read, they receive that story as a decisive break with corrupted Christendom. And my fellow evangelicals, well, we see it as Joseph’s decisive rupture with traditional Christianity.

Both readings present something common: Joseph on one side of the line, traditional Christianity on the other.

But prayer is a strange revealer, isn’t it?

Joseph’s prayer summoned Protestant language, the kind of language that formed his soul early in life. By his childhood, I’m assuming, that phrase—sovereign disposer of all good—was common enough among all Protestant denominations that I provided a strong unifying theme: God is gracious, God is good.

And Joseph hadn’t let go of that.

Not even in turmoil.

Obviously, none of this collapses the theological distance between Joseph and the tradition he left. That distance is quite large. But it does complicate the tidy picture of Josephs Smith I keep defaulting to.

Maybe it does for you as well.

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If you’ve appreciated this essay, you’ll love 40 Questions About Mormonism (Kregel Academic). It’s written for traditional Christians who want clear, charitable, and biblically faithful answers to the most common questions about the Latter-day Saint faith and tradition.

ORDER TODAY and download three free chapters.

“It is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do.”

That’s it.

That single verse from the Book of Mormon long convinced me the doctrine of salvation in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was entirely based on some form of works-righteousness.

At the very least, it was among the least Protestant line I’d ever read.

Or so I thought.

It took awhile, but I’ve come to understand that the application of works to salvation in LDS thought has more to do with degreed exaltation in the afterlife than with salvation per se, but 2 Nephi 25:23 kept bothering me because it reads something like this: “Do the best you can, and God will make up the difference.”

The Martin Luther in me shakes his head: “Nein, Danke.”

Give me sola gratia.

It wasn’t until I read through the Book of Mormon again slowly, more carefully, that I noticed something I hadn’t noticed before. I had to admit that this verse doesn’t communicate what I’d originally assumed, and it might not even mean what some Latter-day Saints have told me it does.

Here’s 2 Nephi 25:23 in full:

For we labor diligently to write, to persuade our children, and also our brethren, to believe in Christ, and to be reconciled to God; for we know that it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do.

Latter-day Saints have quoted this verse ad nauseam to emphasize the necessity of good works in salvation, contra sola fide. Traditional Christians have quoted it, also ad nauseam, as a smoking gun that Mormonism is a works-based religion.

2 Nephi 25:23, to say the least, is a very exhausted verse because both camps generally—there are exceptions—read the phrase “after all we can do” similarly, as a temporal or conditional gate. First, you do everything you can. Then, and only then, grace steps in to cover whatever remains.

On that reading, grace is a supplement to human effort.

But “that’s Pelagianism, Patrick.”

In this essay, I want to argue—likely unoriginally—that this reading is wrong on both sides, and that both sides have been ill-served by it.

My thesis has two parts:

First, 2 Nephi 25:23 isn’t describing a works-grace hybrid soteriology; rather, when read in its context, it’s articulating something more at home in 19th-century Protestantism.

Second, to hammer the first point, “after all we can do,” read in light of 19th-century American usage, means something closer to “despite all we can do.”

I've come to think that what the Book of Mormon is doing here is having Nephi, a sixth-century BC Jew—written by a nineteenth-century American Protestant with his contemporaries in mind—explain to his (Nephi’s) fellow ancient Jews, and to those who would eventually read his record (in the 19th century and beyond, it turns out), why they were still obligated to keep the Law of Moses, despite already knowing salvation would come through the Messiah—all wrapped in something closely resembling Pauline theology.

I know that was probably very confusing; it’s why I need a whole essay to tease it out.

Caveat: I know I’m not the first person to point out the logical (not chronological) reading of 2 Nephi 25:23, especially in light of nineteenth-century American usage of “after” being better understood as “despite”—those aren’t my observations; rather, they belong to two LDS scholars. And I suspect I’m not the first person to argue that second point, either. Let me know via email or in the comments, so I can give proper attribution to the main thought behind this essay.

The Method Behind My Reading

Ok, a quick note before moving on. Anyone reading a text from outside their tradition should be up front about their method. Mine are the ones I learned in seminary, and have put into practice for over thirteen years of exegetical preaching.

1. Grammatical-historical method. Words meant what they meant in the time and place of the writer. A phrase’s meaning today isn’t automatically its meaning in 1830. The interpreter’s first job is to reconstruct the linguistics of the text’s original setting, so far as they are able.

2. Authorial intent. Meaning is what the author was attempting to communicate. This doesn’t mean readers can never draw meaning the author didn’t consciously hold, but it does mean the author set a ceiling for legitimate interpretation. “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me,” can mean I can endure life’s challenges, but it can’t mean I can bench 450 lbs.

3. Immediate literary context. No verse is ever written in a vacuum. The surrounding verses, chapter, and book offer readers the keys to unlock the meaning of smaller portion of the text. A verse ripped from its context can be made to say almost anything.

4. Pastoral application. Exegesis isn’t an end in itself. The point of getting the meaning right is that people are trying to live by the words, so exegesis is the means to application. At least, as a pastor, this is how I preach the Bible. Granted, I won’t find pastoral meaning in a text I don’t considered inspired or canonical (i.e., the Book of Mormon); however, if we assume the original author had a pastoral application in mind, what would it have been?

Apply these four to 2 Nephi 25:23, and something surprising happen, at least, surprising to me.

What’s Nephi Trying to Say?

Before going further, a note for readers unfamiliar with the Book of Mormon.

Latter-day Saints regard it as scripture alongside the Bible. It’s organized into fifteen books—similar to the New Testament is organized into twenty-seven—and 2 Nephi is the second of those books. The narrative tells the story of two peoples, the Nephites and the Lamanites, whom early Latter-day Saints believed were descendants from ancient Israelites led away from Jerusalem before its destruction in 586 BC. God delivered them to the Americas as a new promised land. Nephi, the narrator of this passage, is the founding figure of the Nephites, generally the more righteous group.

Now, 2 Nephi 25 opens with its namesake character, Nephi, explaining why his previous quotations from Isaiah have been so hard for his people to follow.

Isaiah’s prophecies about the Messiah, he says, are difficult for “[his] people” (3) to understand because they don’t know “the manner of prophesying among the Jews” (1). So, Nephi’s going to change his approach. He’s going to “prophesy according to the plainness which hath been with me from the time that I came out from Jerusalem” (4) and he’s going to write in such a way that his people “cannot err” (20).

Let me be crystal clear, is a phrase that we might use today. Nephi wants his contemporaries and “all those that shall receive hereafter these things which I write” (3) to be able to understand what Isaiah’s saying about the future Messiah.

Nephi’s “plainness” (4) begins around verse 12, and runs through the end of the chapter. His argument, condensed, is essentially this: the Messiah will come, he’ll be rejected and crucified by his own people, he’ll rise on the third day, and he alone can save. So, believe in him, and don’t turn away. His name will be Jesus Christ (19).

That sets the frame for verse 23 through to the end of the chapter. Verse 23 says “that it is by grace that we are saved,” and verse 24 immediately adds:

And, notwithstanding we believe in Christ, we keep the law of Moses, and look forward with steadfastness unto Christ, until the law shall be fulfilled.

The word “notwithstanding” is key here. Verse 24 is answering a question raised by verse 23: If salvation is by grace through the coming Messiah, then why on earth are Nephi’s people still keeping the Law of Moses?

Great question.

Nephi’s answer is that the Law hasn’t been fulfilled yet because, it being the 6th century BC (or Before Christ), obviously, Christ hasn’t come yet. The people who know the Messiah is coming still live under the covenant that points to him.

So, now, verses 23 and 24 belong together as a single answer to a single problem. The problem is covenantal and chronological; it’s not really a soteriological problem at all. Nephi isn’t building a doctrine of grace-plus-works; rather, he’s explaining, to his own people—and to the eventual readers of his record—why proto-Christian Jews kept the Torah.

Make sense?

It’s important to grasp that point before moving on.

Put another way, Nephi is, essentially, say, “Yes, yes, of course—we know the Law doesn’t save because Christ alone saves, but he hasn’t come yet, so we keep the Law until he does.”

“After All We Can Do”

But, still, what about “after all we can do”?

It sounds like Nephi is saying, “We know Christ will save us by grace, but we have to put forth the effort first, which is why we keep the Law.”

But I don’t think that’s the right interpretation.

LDS scholars have noticed how “after all we can do” is logical, rather than chronological, and, when put back into its original linguistic environment, means something more like “despite all we can do.”1

Consider these examples, collected from one of those scholars:

• Thomas Blackwell describes finite humanity as “owing his all to God, and having nothing of his own, and who, after all he can do, is still an unprofitable Servant.”

• Samuel Seyer wrote: “It is certain that after all we can do, still we are unprofitable servants.”

• Beilby Porteus: “…after all his endeavours, and the very utmost he can do, he is still not only an unprofitable, but too often an ungrateful and disobedient servant.”

Catch the drift?

In each case, the author is denying that human effort, no matter how thorough, can produce merit before God. These sentences wouldn’t make any sense if “after” were read temporally. Blackwell isn’t saying humanity becomes unprofitable only once every possible work is completed. He’s saying humanity remains unprofitable regardless of what we do, so we are at the complete and utter mercy of God’s grace alone to save us.

That’s classic Protestant soteriology. I preached this same sort of thing on Sundays.

Later examples make the connection to grace explicit.2

• John Hersey, writing in 1831—one year after the Book of Mormon was published—wrote: “your own wisdom and greatness must be laid in the grave—it

  is after all you can do, the free and unmerited gift of God.”

• An 1834 Evangelical Magazine article argued that human effort “unaided by the immediate operation of the Spirit on the heart” is “altogether inadequate to the production of holy affections. . . . And after all they can do, without this

  Divine influence on the heart, they remain utterly unprepared for

  the kingdom of heaven.”

• An 1840 volume titled The Fireside Friend puts it plainly: “after all that you can do, you will find, on examining yourself by the word of God, that you fall short

  of your duty, and need pardon and forgivenesss.”

This phrase, “after all you can do” is a specific rhetorical phrase used to insist that grace is unmerited, i.e., that no amount of human striving closes the gap between sinner and God Almighty.

You can try to jump to the moon, and maybe you achieve a greater height than your neighbors by a few inches, but you’re still off by 238,900 miles, give or take a few thousand.

That’s the sort of thing the author of the Book of Mormon is trying to communicate.

Reading 2 Nephi 25:23 as “it is by grace that we are saved, despite all we can do” isn’t a novel or clever reading; rather, it’s the reading that would have come naturally to informed early nineteenth-century American reader.

Like it or not, the Book of Mormon author here is saying:

It is by grace that we are saved, despite every good work we can perform.

Indeed, LDS apostle Dieter Uchtdorf wondered “if sometimes we [Latter-day Saints] misinterpret the phrase ‘after all we can do’” He said, explicitly: “‘after’ does not equal ‘because.’”

I don’t think he needs to wonder.

He’s exactly right.

Verse 25 is the Hermeneutical Key

Return, now, what Nephi’s arguing. Verse 23 states his purpose—i.e., to persuade his hearers to believe in Christ and to be reconciled to God—and gives the theological ground for that purpose—i.e., because grace saves, despite all we can do.

Verse 24 heads off the obvious question. “If grace saves through the Messiah, why the Law?”

Well, because, says Nephi, the Law hasn’t been fulfilled yet.

Then, verse 25 pulls it all together.

For, for this end was the law given; wherefore the law hath become dead unto us, and we are made alive in Christ because of our faith; yet we keep the law because of the commandments.

Let’s walk through this slowly.

“For, for this end was the law given.” What law? The law of Moses, the one Nephi just said his people keep (see 24). What end? The end just described in verse 24, pointing forward to Christ, until the law shall be fulfilled.

“wherefore . . .” What’s the ‘wherefore’ there for? To point us back to verse 23, that it is by grace that we are saved, despite all we can do.

“the law hath become dead unto us.” In principle, the Law of Moses is dead to Nephi’s people as a means of salvation. Compare this with Paul in Galatians 2:19: “For I through the law am dead to the law, that I might live unto God.” It’s Paul’s same theology, only anachronistically applied to someone who lived centuries before him. The atoning mechanism of the Law was never its power source; rather, grace was always the basis for its power. Therefore, the Law, considered as a means of salvation, is dead.

“and we are made alive in Christ because of our faith.” Because grace saves, faith in Christ is what makes us alive. Works of the Law never did, because they never could to begin with.

And yet, says Nephi…

“we keep the law because of the commandments.” Here’s the conundrum for Nephi’s people, i.e., proto-Christian Jews living six hundred years before Christ with full knowledge of the gospel. Christ hasn’t yet come, obviously, so faith in the coming Messiah is what animates them. And, yet, they still keep the Law.

But why? What’s the point?

Because, God commanded it.

Interestingly, the word “commandment” appears only once in this chapter, but throughout 2 Nephi, it consistently refers to direct instructions from God. So, the sense is that they keep the Law of Moses because God said so, even though they know its saving function is provisional, and its days are numbered.

When read together, verses 23–25 reflect Pauline theology. Grace saves, despite all we can do (see 23). The ancient Jews kept the Law because it hadn’t yet been fulfilled (see 24). The Law was dead to them in principle, because they knew faith in Christ is what makes them alive, and they only keep the Law because God commanded it (see 25).

Again, that’s proto-Pauline theology of the Law compressed into a handful of verses.

Reconciliation and the Apostle Paul

I’d like to elaborate on that last point because the Pauline echoes in 2 Nephi 25:23–25 are hard to miss. The apostle makes the original move in Galatians 3:23–25:

Now before faith came, we were held captive under the law, imprisoned until the coming faith would be revealed. So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian.

The Law guards and anticipates and points forward to the Lord Jesus. So, when the Messiah arrived, the pointer expired—it was no longer needed because the thing pointed to had come. Nephi’s people are on the pre-arrival side of the pointer, which is why he explains things they way he does.

The reconciliation language in verse 23 also reminds the reader of Pauline theology. Reconciliation is among Paul’s preferred categories for what Christ accomplished on the cross.

• “For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son . . .” (Romans 5:10).

• “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. . . . God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them” (2 Corinthians 5:18-19).

• “Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death . . .” (Col. 1:21-22a).

Reconciliation is what God does through Christ, on the ground of grace, apart from human merit. It’s not something we start, and then God supplements. The book of Galatians is, in essence, making that same point, warning that any reconciliation apart from Christ nullifies His finished work.

Now, consider the layering of the Book of Mormon to understand what the original author intended to say in 2 Nephi 25:23.

The text presents Nephi, a sixth-century BC Jewish figure, writing to fellow Jews about a Messiah he expects, but hasn’t seen yet. The text also presents itself, through the persona of Nephi, to nineteenth-century American Protestant readers who know the Messiah has come.

Nephi’s rhetorical situation requires him to hold both audiences at once.

So, to his own people, he must explain why they still keep Torah, but to his eventual readers, he must communicate what the Messiah accomplishes.

Add to this dual-audience the vocabulary the author uses—i.e., Jacobean English employed by an early nineteenth-century American—and the theology the author deploys—i.e., Protestant doctrine of grace: reconciliation, faith in Christ, salvation by grace despite all we can do.

Tracking? (I’m sorry if not; this was quite a complicated thing to explain…)

Let me show this concept visually.

Scroll back up to the top of the essay, and examine the image. It’s from a 14th century French Bible.

Moses stands on Sinai and extends both hands to touch the tablets containing the Law.3 On the other side, the Law is held out by the two hands of Christ-Logos. Notice, the Law comes from Christ because the Law points to Christ. Moses receives it from Christ.

That’s late medieval Christian theology that the Book of Mormon author, through Nephi, is expressing, because both are the theology Paul laid out in his epistles.

The Law of Moses was a schoolmaster to God’s people, until Christ should come. This is a very old Christian conviction. The Book of Mormon, in its own way, is expressing it.

Two Big Takeaways

If this reading is right, then, in my opinion, both the standard LDS and traditional Christian could benefit from revisiting this verse.

First, the traditional Christian polemical use of this verse turns out to be quite fragile because 2 Nephi 25:23 isn’t a proof-text that the Book of Mormon teaches work-righteousness. Now, that doesn’t resolve every soteriological difference between traditional Christianity and Latter-day Saint theology—there are real differences, I’ve written about them elsewhere, and I think legalism is a serious issue in the LDS Church, I’ve not been shy about my opinion on this. And neither does my reading authenticate the Book of Mormon as an inspired text worthy of canonicity.

At least, those aren’t the conclusions I was lead to; rather, to me, it shows how deeply embedded in Protestant theology the original author(s) of this passage was.

What it does, however, is takes this particular verse off the table as ammunition. Evangelicals who quote this verse to prove Mormonism is legalistic are using something the text doesn’t support, and will need to look elsewhere for that evidence.

The LDS reading has a different task, though, because the “prerequisite gate” interpretation has been read to me so often that, apparently, it’s become an identity marker. I think it’s ill-serving Latter-day Saint readers, though. If “all we can do” is the prerequisite for grace, then no one qualifies.

Consider Ephesians 2:8–10

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

Grace saves, through faith, not of works. Then, works arrive in verse 10, not as the price of grace but as its product.

Just as the sun produces light and heat, so faith produces good works. It’s impossible for faith not to produce good works, just as it is impossible for the sun not to produce light and heat.

In short, first, God saves, and then his people walk in the works he laid out for them.

Notice how that’s precisely the sequence Nephi describes. First, “We are made alive in Christ because of our faith,” and, second, “we keep the law because of the commandments” (2 Nephi 25:25).

Made alive first, by grace, through faith. Then the works, keeping the Law, follow, because God commanded them.

That’s why the “prerequisite-gate” reading of 2 Nephi 25 falls apart. I’ve heard Latter-day Saints explain, essentially, that “after all we can do” is the toll we pay, and grace is what waits on the far side.

But neither Paul nor the author of 2 Nephi 25 place works before grace. Both put grace first and works after, as fruit to receive rather than a fee to pay.

In the end, it’s God alone—through the atonement of the Son by the power of the Spirit—that we are redeemed from sin and death. That’s why we can say, soli Deo gloria: to God alone be the glory for our salvation.

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If you’ve appreciated this essay, you’ll love 40 Questions About Mormonism (Kregel Academic). It’s written for traditional Christians who want clear, charitable, and biblically faithful answers to the most common questions about the Latter-day Saint faith and tradition.

ORDER TODAY and download three free chapters.

“Some have entertained angels unawares” by Edward Clifford (1871)

In the first essay of this series, I tried to show that Christians have been thinking carefully about non-human intelligence (NHI) for the better part of two thousand years, and that the tradition is in remarkably good shape. While they wondered how the science and theology worked, none seem to have worried about whether human beings would still be special if the universe turned out to be crowded.

So, if the historical Christian conversation about NHI was that confident, why is the contemporary Christian conversation so anxious? Why do thoughtful believers hedge or qualify or change the subject when the topic comes up?

I want to suggest, in this essay, that the answer is not in our theology; rather, it’s in something further down stream, something we don’t usually think about, because its part of the Zeitgeist in which we live, part of the air we breathe. We have, somewhere along the way, stopped genuinely believing in the NHI our own tradition tells us are already here. We profess them, sure, but we don’t actually expect them.

At any case, my central proposition for the essay is this:

We probably don’t inhabit the world that the Bible assumes.

And because we don’t, we’re not equipped to think about—let alone discuss—the prospect that humans aren’t the most intelligent things in God’s creation.

Entertaining Angels Unawares

Read that again.

Notice how straightforward, even nonchalant, the author is about the incredible hypothetical that we have interacted with angels without knowing it. The book of Hebrews is, implicitly at least, assuming that encounters with angels happen, in ordinary life, and often enough to warrant a general rule of Christian conduct.

Such encounters are framed as a live possibility for everyone, as mundane as a person inviting a traveler in for dinner. They aren’t remarkable visionary experiences beholding terrible creatures levitating with wings, ringed with unblinking eyes. There’s nothing mystical about it.

The angel looked like Carl from Accounting.

I’ve heard arguments that “angels” here simply means ‘messengers of the gospel.’ They’re human evangelists. This is, in my opinion, a modernist’s take mapped onto the New Testament, maybe even an embarrassed sensibility trying to make the book of Hebrews palatable to a skeptic’s tongue.

Yes, the Greek angelos can mean “messenger.” But the word appears thirteen times across Hebrews, and in every other instance it unambiguously means supernatural beings. The whole argument of chapter 2 is that Christ is superior to the angels. No one reads that as ‘Jesus outranks traveling preachers.’ Of course He does. Besides, any first-century Jewish-Christian would have heard “entertained angels unawares” and thought immediately of Abraham at Mamre and Lot at Sodom. If angelos just means “human evangelist,” the verse is nonsense: Be hospitable to strangers, because some of those strangers might turn out to be strangers. There’s nothing to be unawares of. It’s eisegesis driven by the presuppositions of a disenchanted world.

And that’s precisely my point.

We’ve become so modernized—so ‘sophisticated,’ so ‘material’—that we can’t take this advice seriously. This verse is telling Christians that God may send non-human, angelic intelligent beings to receive your hospitality, and that you can’t readily distinguish them from humans, so the appropriate response is, therefore, to be hospitable to everyone, just in case.

Do you really believe that?

Be honest.

The author of Hebrews certainly did. The world this author inhabited was filled with humans and NHIs, both, side by side, in ordinary life.

Now go further.

When was the last time you actually looked at a stranger—in class, at a checkout line, in a coffeeshop—and entertained, in real time, the possibility that you were in the presence of a NHI sent by God? I’m not talking about a thought experiment. I’m asking, when is the last time you saw a person and thought it might be an angel?

If your answer is “never,” I would suggest you don’t actually believe Hebrews 13:2. You believe that the verse is in the Bible.

But that’s a different thing.

Ok, so, what am I doing here? Am I saying we should be angel detectors, always on the look out? No, because that’s not the point Hebrews 13 is making. What I’m doing here is stress-testing the gap between what you profess and what you expect. You can profess Hebrews 13:2 without expecting Hebrews 13:2. You can affirm it without ever expecting it to show up as a live category in the way you actually move through the world. That gap is what the rest of this essay is about. It’s where, I’m going to argue, our anxiety about NHI originates.

Functional Materialism

Now, let me press harder. Suppose a Christian friend came to you, confiding to you strange things that clearly trouble them.

They say you something like: “I think there’s something demonic going on in my house. I have been waking up at 3 a.m. because I feel like I’m being watched. One of my kids says they’ve heard voices at night telling them we don’t love her, and that she is bad.”

What’s your immediate response?

Be honest.

Most of us, raised in late-modern Western Christianity, would feel an immediate cluster of reactions that we’re too embarrassed to admit. Concern, of course, but concern of a particular kind.

Are they sleeping enough? Have they been under stress at work? Is there a history of mental illness in the family? Should I gently suggest their child see a therapist?

Now, granted, these aren’t bad questions. Sleep and stress and mental health; these are all real factors of life, and wise pastoral council addressed them. But notice what has happened: the order of explanation has been inverted. The first move of our modern Christian mind, when confronted with a report of demonic activity, is to look for natural explanations, and then only to consider supernatural ones as an ancillary category.

It’s the explanation we reach for when nothing else fits, when all other options are exhausted.

The New Testament never works that way.

It treats demonic activity as one possiblility among others, weighed alongside ordinary causes, with no particular embarrassment about taking the supernatural option seriously when the evidence suggests it.

Now, to be clear, I’m not arguing for a return to some primitive cosmology. And I’m certaintly not suggesting we ignore mental health, or substitute exorcism for medication, or pretend that every sensation of dread is a demon. There are plenty of quacks and grifters in the deliverance ministry world who prey on that sort of thing, and scripture’s command to test the spirits applies as much to charismatic excess as it does to anything else.

What I am asking is for us to notice that the practical disposition of most Western Christians toward activity by NHI is functionally identical to the practical disposition of a thoughtful secular materialist. Both of us reach for naturalistic explanations first. Both of us treat the supernatural as embarrassing until proven otherwise. The difference between us is that the materialist is being consistent with her metaphysics, but we aren’t.

Screwtape’s Ideal Worldview

Ok, so, what happened?

C.S. Lewis can help explain. He predicted all this back in the 1940s.

The Screwtape Letters contains what is probably the most cited passage about devils in twentieth-century Christian writing: that the two errors a person can fall into about them are disbelieving in their existence, and being unhealthily fascinated with them, and that devils are equally pleased by both.

What’s less often noticed is the strategic claim that follows from this in the letters themselves. Screwtape, advising his nephew Wormwood on how to corrupt his ‘patient,’ makes it explicit early on: do not, under any circumstances, allow him to think clearly about the supernatural. Don't argue with him, because argument might wake him up. Just keep him comfortable, in the half-asleep assumption that “real life” means “ordinary material life,” and that anything else is by definition unreal, or eccentric, or for the unstable.

Screwtape isn’t particularly worried that his patient will become a pagan, or a magician, or a Theosophist. He’s worried that his patient will become Christian, and the most reliable barrier between his patient and Christianity is the unspoken assumption that the supernatural isn’t part of the real world. Materialism, Screwtape says, is one of Hell’s most useful philosophies, not because it’s true, but because materialism makes the gospel sound unrespectable.

This is the part of The Screwtape Letters that I think modern Christians need to consider most. Lewis is making the point that the demons want us not to believe in them, and the materialist intellectual climate of the modern West is precisely the climate they would design if they could. The skepticism we feel about the supernatural isn’t, on Lewis’s reading, a neutral byproduct of scientific progress; rather, it’s a strategically positive condition for the very beings whose existence it denies.

The didn’t create it, but they’ve certainly leveraged. “The more sinister, the more Satanic,” is a mantra in spiritual abuse counseling. It certainly applies here.

Now, you don’t have to accept Lewis’s full demonology to agree with his argument. You only have to ask: “If there were beings whose work depended on humans not believing in them, what intellectual climate would those beings most prefer?” And then, look at the worldview you actually inhabit.

The honest answer is uncomfortable, I know, because the worldview we live is precisely the worldview such beings would want.

At least, that was Lewis’s argument, and I think there’s something to it.

Christian Anxiety about Non-Human Intelligence

Ok, let’s pull these two threads of thought together.

First, if we truly believe the faith we claim to, then non-human intelligence exists. At a minimum, in the forms of angels and demons.

Second, because we’re are late-modern Western Christians, we inhabit a world in which materialism is the de facto worldview, which prevents us from actually believing in non-human intelligence.

So, we say we believe is scripture, but what we actually believe is something like Christian-inflected materialism. And we confess angels and demons, but what we expect is neurology and sociology.

That gap creates the anxiety.

And, again, it’s an anxiety our medieval predecessors didn’t seem to feel. They lived in a world they knew was already full of intelligences besides their own. They weren’t afraid of being outclassed cognitively, because they already believed they were. Angels were, by all accounts, far smarter than we are. I struggle to believe, then, that the discovery of additional NHIs in the cosmos would have been for them a category-breaking event. No, I think it would have been a category-extending one.

So, why would it be for us?

Because it threatens to break the category we’ve allowed to shrink to almost nothing.

We’ve allowed the universe of rational beings to contract, in our practical imagination, to Homo sapiens alone. And once a universe of rational beings is reduced to only us, every potential addition feels like a threat to our place in it.

Now, to be clear, I don’t think our anxiety would be alleviated by better arguments about extraterrestrials. I’m sensing that’s a solution bubbling beneath the surface at the moment, and predict it’s one many Christian leaders will make, or have already started to, e.g., it’s all demonic. (That’s misguided, as I argued earlier.)

The cure, instead, is recovering the enchanted world of Christianity we already profess. If we genuinely believed that we share the cosmos with angelic intelligences greater than our own, then the question of whether we share it with biological intelligences elsewhere would lose most of its sting. We would already know what it feels like not to be the smartest things in the room.

And, that brings me to the question I want to take up in the next essay: If intelligence is not what makes human beings unique, what does? Here, I think, Christianity has an answer that’s not only adequate to the cosmological discovery we may be about to make, but actually clarified by it.

The image of God isn’t the rational mind. It’s something else, something the angels do not posess, something the cleverest possible alien would not threaten.

We will get to that next.

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“It is generally acknowledged that Mormonism is similar to Mohammedanism [Islam] in its endorsement of the practice of polygamy, and its ideas of heaven. Many other points of similarity between these systems have been noted by students, and the Book of Mormon has marked resemblance to the Koran. As all ancient religions have a modern equivalent, Mormonism can justly be claimed to be the modern form of Mohammedanism, and not incorrectly termed ‘the Islam of America.’”

— Foreword to Bruce Kinney’s “Mormonism: The Islam of America” (1912)

What if I told you there was a man who claimed God called him to be a prophet.

The religious context around him, he’d have said later in life, was a mess. But God was doing something different, a new thing—and it would be brought about exclusively through him. There’d be signs, of course. He’d commune with angels, and he’d prophesy. His was an example to follow, people would later say. Well, not entirely. He’d not be without his faults—this man found that a single wife was insufficient, and so he entered into polygamy.

What would you say about a man like that?

Would you believe his claims?

I do.

Abraham is among my favorite men in the Hebrew Bible. His story is messy, and it’s meant to be. I think he sinned in taking on an additional wife, but I believe he communed with angels, was a prophet of God, and the progenitor of the people through whom the messiah came.

What I don’t think Abraham anticipated, though, was just how many men throughout history would come to mimic his life.

In the seventh century, another man claimed much the same. The religious world around him was a mess, he’d have said, crowded with idols and the broken remnants of older faiths. But God was doing something new through him, and through him alone. There were signs, of course. An angel, Jibreel, came to him with words to recite, and he prophesied, too. He also found one wife insufficient, and took others. This was Muhammad.

Hear the rhyming?

Christians throughout history have pointed to Muhammad as the archetypal false prophet, and to his religion, Islam, a false one. He didn’t just mimic Father Abraham. He supplanted Abraham’s offspring, the messiah, Jesus Christ, claiming the place of God’s greatest prophet for himself. And he produced new scripture, the Qur’an, that he held to be superior to the corrupted books that came before.

Martin Luther, for example, lumped the papacy and Islam together as twin idolatries. He believed the pope was Antichrist and the Turk was the devil, and he wrote a children’s hymn so the next generation would learn to sing against both at once.

John Calvin followed Luther on this. He declared that the Qur’an was to the Muslim what papal decrees were to the Catholic. They were, as he put it, the two horns of Antichrist.

Protestants “seized on Islam as a weapon against Catholicism,” noted one scholar, and then “also used Islam to critique intra-Protestant divisions,” especially heresies within their movement, like the Socinians.

For their part, theologians of the Catholic Counter-Reformation returned the favor. Robert Bellarmine argued that the Reformers had unwittingly taken their cues from Islam. Both Muhammad and the Reformers, he said, had rejected the rule of faith that preceded them in order to concoct an aberrant reading of Christian scripture, and the result in both cases was a new religion.

The tactic was a two-way street: Catholic vs. Protestant, Protestant vs. Catholic, and never with much evidence on either side, because evidence wasn’t the point.

John Tolan, in Faces of Muhammad, shows how the prophet of Islam has been read through a Western lens in every age. What interests me is how he functions as a kind of Rorschach test. He’s evil or exemplary depending on whichever opponent you want to associate him with. When Christians need a malignant archetype to compare their enemies to, he’s the villain. When French Enlightenment elites want to tear down the Catholic Church, they hold him up as a reformer. Even Napoleon, who admired him as a statesman, viewed Muhammad’s epileptic fits—commonly interpreted as a sign of demonic possession—as evidence of his humanity, since Caesar suffered the same affliction.

Muhammad becomes whatever the moment requires, but for Christians he’s almost always a negative example.

I spent time during my doctoral studies in religion working through the history of this rhetorical move, which I came to call “Islamic calumny”: the libelous association of a non-Muslim opponent with Islam or Muhammad in order to damage their reputation. The Dutch scholar Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje was, so far as I can tell, the first to notice the pattern. In 1916, he coined the awkward term “cryptomohammedanism,” so I prefer Islamic calumny.

It comes in two strengths.

The weak form insinuates that someone resembles Muhammad or his religion by parallel. The strong form directly accuses them of being a secret Muslim. If you recall, Donald Trump made it a habit, years ago, of suggesting that Barack Obama was secretly a Muslim. That’s a classic example of the strong form.

I stumbled across the weak form just a few days ago, when an popular interview clip made the rounds. In it, the host and guest, a Christian apologist, compare Joseph Smith to Muhammad, and in doing so they joined, perhaps unwittingly, a long line of Christians who’ve made the same move for generations.

Joseph Smith, the “Yankee Mohamet”

By the time Bruce Kinney published Mormonism: The Islam of America in 1912—quoted at the top of this essay—the idea had so permeated the American imagination that the foreword I quoted treated the parallel as common knowledge rather than a claim that needed any defense.

There’s no need to prove the parallel, because everyone already knew.

A century later, the argument is still being made the same way. The interview clip works because the audience already dislikes Muhammad enough that comparing Joseph Smith to him is sufficient as a condemnation.

This maneuver usually rests on a surface trio of red flags—prophet, angel (Jibreel/Moroni), and polygamy—but falls apart the moment you apply sustained pressure. Muhammad subordinated Jesus to himself, but Joseph kept Jesus at the center of his system, whether it was the Book of Mormon, D&C 76, temple rituals. Whatever else can be said about Joseph’s theology—and there’s plenty—he didn’t demote Jesus to make room for himself. Indeed, if I were a betting man, I’d say Muhammad would have found Joseph to be guilt of the sin of shirk.

Mine isn’t a new observation. Writing in Dialogue back in 1971, Arnold H. Green and Lawrence P. Goldrup argued, rather bluntly, that the Islam-Mormonism comparison obscures more than it reveals. Two out of every three points of similarity turn out to be either untrue or oversimplified, and the analogy itself is an oversimplification. We run the risk of “parallelomania,” the term Samuel Sandmel coined in 1962 for exactly this kind of overreach.1

For me, though, it’s striking just how unoriginal the comparison is.

Joseph’s earliest critics were anything but subtle about using it. Abner Cole called Smith “the imposter of Mecca,” adding that “no mandate of Mohamet was ever more implicitly obeyed” than Smith’s commands among his followers.2 From there, it became a standard move. Eber D. Howe lumped Smith into a category of false messiahs led by “Mahomet, who is considered the prince of impostors.”3 Anti-Mormon polemicists dubbed Smith the “New York Mahomet,” the “American Mahomet,” the “Yankee Mahomet.” By 1854, one book embedded it into the title—Memoirs of the Life and Death of Joseph Smith, the American Mohamet. In 1912, Bruce Kinney published Mormonism: The Islam of America.4 I could go on and on.

Here’s what I found really interesting when I worked through these books for my research: all of them promised a comparison, but never deliver one. The Muhammad analogy is in the title and sometimes the preface, but after that, the text just goes about its business of attacking Joseph for the same handful of reasons every anti-Mormon book of that era attacked him, e.g., the Spaulding-Rigdon theory of the Book of Mormon, polygamy, Smith’s character, etc. The Muhammad comparison was front-loaded but rarely materialized in the books.

And, yet, it still landed with readers.

Why?

Here was my conclusion:

Comparing Joseph Smith to Muhammad functioned—as it still functions—by borrowing the reader’s existing distaste for one figure and applying it to another without needing to actually defend the parallel.

It relies more on a person’s dislike of Muhammad than Joseph’s similarities with him.

The reason it can’t definitively deliver a verdict is because it can’t sustain the argument it promises and instead hopes you’ll not ask many questions. Once you get past prophet, angels, and polygamy, the comparison soon runs out of road. The apologist has to keep retreating to vaguer and vaguer ground. They start talking about charisma, then about deceived followers. Eventually—as the gentleman in the video does—they start talking about demons.

That last move is the final tell, when the whole thing transmutes from a comparison to an exorcism. The argument isn’t about Joseph Smith or Muhammad anymore; rather, it’s now about the speaker’s need to toss both of them to the same theological trashcan.

Now, to be clear, the one thing Joseph Smith and Muhammad do have in common for me is that neither was a prophet. Saying so plainly is honest conviction—I’d be a Latter-day Saint or Muslim, otherwise—and it’s a different act from the calumny I’ve been describing. But, if we’re not careful, this sort of thing can drift into bearing false witness and slander.

Remember, the assumption of Islamic calumny is that your audience holds negative views toward Muhammad and Islam, and maybe even Muslims themselves. There’s a reason the apologist in the interview can’t make the argument in, say, Muslim-majority Indonesia. The whole rhetorical maneuver follows contempt. Strip out the contempt, and the comparison loses much of its force. So, what sounds like an argument in America would sound like an insult in Jakarta, and an unintelligible one at that.

I think that’s a missiological observation that gets tossed aside when the Joseph-Muhammad comparison is made. The comparison only works in front of audiences who already despise the comparison’s other half, so, to be frank, it’s not really an argument—it’s a shibboleth. It doesn’t persuade anyone who needs persuading, and it risks slandering people who aren’t part of the tribe.

A Better Comparison

So, I want to recommend something better—the only comparison I think is worth making.

The real parallel between Muhammad and Joseph isn’t prophet + angels + polygamy. It’s that both men were reacting against a version of Christianity they did not fully understand, and both built a new revelation on top of a misdiagnosis.

Consider Muhammad first. The Qur’an’s picture of the Trinity isn’t the Nicene confession. In Surah Al-Ma’idah (5), Allah asks Jesus whether he told people to take him and his mother as gods alongside Allah. The most defensible reading is that the verse rebukes excessive Marian devotion, so the Qur’an’s picture of Christian belief was confused about Mary’s status and never engaged the Nicene confession on its own terms. Whether this reflects direct contact with a Collyridian sect or a more general confusion about Marian devotion among Arabian Christians is debated. My point, here, holds either way. Muhammad was reacting to a caricature of Christianity rather than to the faith Christians actually confess. His new revelation answered a problem the church never actually had.

Now for Joseph Smith. The founding narrative of the Mormons, as a restoration movement, depends on the Great Apostasy. In the First Vision account, Joseph reports being told that all the existing churches were corrupt, and that their creeds were an abomination. The premise of Mormonism is this diagnosis. Joseph said the keystone of the religion is the Book of Mormon, but, without the Great Apostasy, there’d be no need for the Book of Mormon. It’s why the First Vision precedes Moroni.

If the authority and power of the church the Lord Jesus founded didn’t waned and eventually vanish from the earth, then there’s nothing to restore, only to reform or renew. But Joseph encountered frontier American Protestantism in its most fractured and revivalist form, drew the conclusion that the original church had been lost, and then built a new dispensation on the diagnosis.

But his diagnosis was wrong. The power and authority of the ancient church didn’t vanish. The creeds weren’t corruptions but careful clarifications worked out by men trying to be faithful to what the apostles handed down. Like Muhammad, Joseph was reacting to a version of Christianity that orthodox Christians don’t actually recognize.

So, consider that both men encountered Christianity in a distressed state, and then both drew incorrect conclusions about what orthodox Christianity actually taught. This led both men to produce—sincerely, I believe—new revelations to fix problems that weren’t really there.

In Muhammad’s case, the misdiagnosis was Christological and Trinitarian. In Joseph’s case, the misdiagnosis was ecclesiological and scriptural. The patient wasn’t as sick as either physician believed, and the cure each prescribed was worse than the disease they thought they saw, since it fractured Christianity even further.

I find this lone Smith-Muhammad comparison helpful for two reasons.

First, it treats both men as sincere religious actors rather than as cynical frauds or demonic puppets. This is consonant with what I believe about Joseph’s motivation as a sincere actor, although I don’t find his sincerity a measure of veracity. He wasn’t a conscious liar; rather, he genuinely believed he was recovering something ancient and lost. The same charity, extended to Muhammad, suggests a man trying to call his people away from idolatry toward the worship of one God, working with the materials at hand, which included a distorted picture of the Christian faith. One can be wrong without being wicked.

Second, it puts the conversation on better ground. Islamic calumny was never going to persuade a Latter-day Saint of anything except that the speaker hadn’t done the homework. I think my misdiagnosis framing actually opens a door because it asks a better question: “What did the NT church teach, and did its power and authority ever disappear?” If we can talk about that, then we can talk about whether Joseph had anything to restore in the first place. And, as a bonus, we can talk about it without relying on prejudice.

There’s a place for sharp arguments against Joseph Smith’s prophetic claims. In my opinion, the historic Christian witness against the Great Apostasy thesis is among the sharpest available. But it doesn’t require a low and lazy comparison maneuver that depends on an audience already disliking Islam.

At any rate, I think the Smith-Muhammad comparison yields as many similarities as it does differences, and so loses whatever force it pretends to carry. A measure that returns a match and a mismatch on every point isn’t measuring anything. Indeed, if we’re honest, it acts more like a mirror the apologist holds up mostly to see his own contempt looking back.

So, set the mirror down. The question worth our time was never whether Joseph rhymes with Muhammad. It’s whether the church Jesus founded ever lost the authority Joseph said it lost. Put that question to a man you take to be sincere, and you’ve traded a lazy slur for an argument that’s worth discussing.

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Frontispiece of Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, engraving by Jean Dolivar (1686)

Note: This essay is the first in a multi-part series titled “Theology at the Edge of the Cosmos.” I'm writing about the phenomena now not because I think disclosure is imminent, but because the conversation about non-human intelligence is happening and picking up speed with or without the church. I’d rather we not smirk our way into irrelevance on this one.

In Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers (1857), Mrs. Eleanor Bold is teased a bit about her views on life beyond Earth:

“Are you a Whewellite or a Brewsterite, Mrs. Bold?” said Charlotte, who knew a little about everything, and had read about a third of each of the books to which she alluded.

“Oh!” said Eleanor; “I have not read any of the books, but I feel sure that there is one man in the moon at least, if not more.”

“You don’t believe in the pulpy gelatinous matter?” said Bertie.

“I heard about that,” said Eleanor; “and I really think it’s almost wicked to talk in such a manner. How can we argue about God’s power in the other stars from the laws which he has given for our rule in this one?”

“How, indeed!” said Bertie. “Why shouldn’t there be a race of salamanders in Venus?”1

In his Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine, Andrew Davison highlights this exchange for its insight into a cultural moment.

The characters are sophisticated socialites, not theologians. Being a “Whewellite” or “Brewsterite” meant subscribing to one of two schools of thought: 1) following William Whewell, who published Of the Plurality of Worlds in 1853, arguing on Christological grounds against life elsewhere; or 2) following David Brewster, who replied the next year with More Worlds Than One, arguing for it.

The “pulpy gelatinous matter” Eleanor is teased about is a dig at Whewell’s speculation that any life on Saturn or Jupiter would be “boneless, watery, pulpy creatures.”2

Notice, though, how the exchange was public and quite ordinary. It was an ongoing controversy that educated Christians debated.

“How can we argue about God’s power?”

How indeed.

Just a clarification, since I anticipate returning to similar ones through this series. Obviously, there are no salamanders on Venus. We know what the Victorians didn’t, that Venus is a massive, toxic greenhouse hellscape where sulfuric acid rains down. Not very conducive to fragile, aquatic lizards.

But that’s beside the point. Almost none of the nineteenth-century guesses about astrobiology were correct. The question is the underlying posture, i.e., the easy assumption that the cosmos God made is generous enough to teem with life, and that, whatever those creatures turn out to be, the gospel still applies.

A century and a half later, Carl Sagan wondered why no major religion had looked at modern cosmology and concluded, “This is better than we thought.” Instead, he complained, religious people seem to say: “No, no, no. My god is a little god and I want him to stay that way.”3

Sagan’s complaint is myopic. The Barchester Towers scene is just one piece of evidence. Christian theologians have been discussing other worlds and potential inhabitants since at least the Middle Ages, and the conversation extends back through the Church Fathers to the pre-Socratics. They have, generally speaking, found the prospect more invigorating than threatening. Some, like Nicholas of Cusa, held important church positions. Others, like Richard Baxter, found cosmic life theologically consoling.

I think it’s an uninteresting question to ask whether Christianity can survive the discovery of non-human intelligence. The more interesting question is why, in our particular moment, so many Christians act as though it can’t.

Before moving on, almost everything historical and theological that follows is drawn from Davison’s Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine. He was the right man for the book. Davison is Regius Professor of Divinity and residentiary canon at Christ Church, Oxford, and wrote Astrobiology while a resident at Princeton’s Center of Theological Inquiry, in partnership with NASA.4 In my opinion, Davison has produced what is presently the definitive theological treatment of the field.

For this essay, I rely heavily on him. The historical narrative is his, as is his survey of the debates through the ages. Where I quote a primary source, I’m almost certainly quoting it through him.

What I’ve done is more modest: I’ve created a taxonomy based on his research. Davison’s treatment is organized around loci communes (e.g., creation, angels, revelation). I’ve condensed and rearranged some of that material into twelve positions under three axes: 1) Whether other worlds exist; 2) Whether those worlds are populated, and 3) What forms of non-human intelligence (NHI) Christianity has historically considered.

In short, the taxonomy is mine, but the substance is his. Read Davison if you want to read seriously here.

Think of this essay as a doorway.

A Brief Note on Two Important Terms

For the purpose of these essays, by “non-human intelligence” (NHI), I mean any rational, self-conscious being other than human beings, so, broader than “extraterrestrials,” including angels and demons, antipodeans, the fairies and elves of folk Christianity, etc.

A “world” is defined as any reality in which beings live and move and have their being—whether perceivable by humans or not—bounded by physical distance, time, dimension, or some other ordering principle that is created and sustained by God the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. This definition covers exoplanets, parallel universes, the angelic realm, and whatever else God’s creation contains. It rules out only realities not held in being by the Triune God, who was, is, and always will be utterly and completely distinct and Other than all things He creates.

With these terms defined, we now to turn to the taxonomy at hand, namely:

How have Christians throughout history thought about other worlds and their potential inhabitants?

Axis 1: Positions on Whether Other Worlds Exist

1. Impossibilism. Other worlds cannot exist. William of Auvergne (d. 1249) held the impossibility lay in the nature of “world” itself. Albert the Great (d. 1280) and Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) arrived at the same conclusion by a different route, arguing from the unity of God’s order: a “world” just is a single ordered whole, and since everything God creates stands in ordered relation to everything else and to God, all created things belong to one world by definition.5 Interestingly, the chief medieval objection was not about Christology or soteriology; rather, it was their view of physics. Since bodies have a single natural center of gravity, and Earth was considered the universe’s center, all objects would be attracted to and eventually collide with Earth. Why, then, would God create worlds teeming with life only to have them collide and destroy us all at some point in the future?

2. Possibilism. God could create other worlds. This view gained dominance after a turning point, in 1277, when Étienne Tempier (d. 1279), Archbishop of Paris, condemned over two hundred propositions, including the assertion that “the first cause cannot make more than one world.” Bonaventure (d. 1274), for instance, taught God could make “a hundred worlds.” Richard of Middleton (d. 1308), William of Ockham (d. 1347), and Jean Buridan (d. 1362) all affirmed this possibility. William of Vaurouillon (d. 1463) pushed it to its limit, arguing God could make an infinite number of worlds. Notably, he was also among the first Western Christian theologians (as far as we can tell) to explicitly consider what inhabitants on another world would mean for sin, salvation, and the Incarnation.

3. Actualism. Other worlds exist, and they are inhabited. Nicholas of Cusa (d. 1464) wrote in On Learned Ignorance (1440) that “the regions of the other stars are similar to this, for we believe that none of them is deprived of inhabitants.” Notably, he did so without losing his standing as a cardinal. Giordano Bruno (d. 1600) advanced the same thesis a century later and was burned, though, as Davison points out, his condemnation stemmed not from his cosmology but from his collapsing of the Creator-creation distinction. By the seventeenth century, actualism had broad sympathy across confessions. Johannes Kepler (d. 1630) asked whether God could possibly have “used up all His skill on the globe of the Earth,” while Tommaso Campanella (d. 1639) argued, in his Defense of Galileo (1622), that beings on other worlds, not descended from Adam, would not be fallen. Richard Baxter (d. 1691) found consolation in the thought of cosmic life. It eased his anxiety over the number of the damned by reframing the question of scale. The damned on Earth aren’t fewer in number, sure, but they’re fewer in proportion to the whole of God’s creation. Zoom out to a cosmos filled with inhabited worlds, Baxter argued, and the objection to God’s goodness loses much of its force.

So, as far as other worlds are concerned, Christians generally fell into one of three camps: 1) God could but wouldn’t create other worlds, 2) God could and might create other worlds, and 3) God could and has created other worlds.

What they all agreed on was God’s ability; their disagreement concerned God’s will.

Now, if the possibilists and actualists were correct, what kind of life, if any, inhabits God’s worlds?

Axis 2: Positions on Whether Other Worlds Are Populated

4. Uninhabited worlds. Some believed the other worlds were simply devoid of life, regardless of their conditions. This position affirms the plurality of God’s planets without committing to the plurality of God’s creatures.

5. Worlds inhabited only by non-rational life. Microbes, plants, animals, but no rational creatures. Anything created on Days 3, 5 and 6 before noon were fine, but the afternoon’s creation—other Adams from alien dust—was a step too far. Microbial life on Mars would fall here. This position is, theologically, the safest option if one believes in other worlds, because it leaves Christology untouched. Edward Maunder, in 1913, conceded that this sort of life might exist elsewhere in the cosmos; however, he argued that given the “exceptional” conditions that are require for life as we know it, the number of planets meeting these conditions must be “few in number,” meaning such life—and thus NHI—is incredibly rare.6 Presently, Christian astronomer Hugh Ross is among the leading evangelical voices arguing the same. Maunder admirably ends his book suggesting Christians should be less interested in looking for other worlds than the world to come. That’s true, but beside the point.

6. Worlds inhabited by unfallen rational creatures. This was Vaurouillon’s and Campanella’s hypothesis: rational beings exist elsewhere but, not being descended from Adam, haven’t inherited his sin. This quarantines the Fall to Earth alone, and preserves classical soteriology. This is the general assumption C.S. Lewis takes in The Space Trilogy, which will be explored in later essays.

7. Worlds inhabited by fallen rational creatures. This is the hard case to defend, and Davison surveys only serious answers. In sum, God has either 1) brought about a single cosmic Incarnation embracing all rational creatures; 2) multiple Incarnations of the Son in different natures; or 3) entirely distinct economies of grace, or what I call “Cosmic Dispensationalism.” This is where Christians have argued most strenuously. The Christological worry—Phillip Melanchthon (d. 1560), when speaking of inhabitants on other worlds, named it thus: “the Son of God is one . . . died and was resurrected only once”—is the chief objection, and the one I see most often today among those who have thought this through. The concern is about the mechanics of Christ’s atonement, not whether human beings would still feel special. I respect this concern greatly.

Axis 3: The Christian NHI Tradition Beyond Other Worlds

With those two axes in mind, I’d like us to consider how Christianity has always thought about the existence of NHI.

8. Angels and demons are the most obvious example. In Christian thought, angels are not biological. Material, perhaps, but in a way we don’t understand. They are, however, more intelligent than humans. Aquinas held them vastly more powerful in cognition and will than any embodied creature. As Davison puts it, the inclusion of angels means “human beings are not the most elevated or advanced beings within creation.” Christianity has always said we are outclassed.

9. Long ago, Christianity entertained the idea that celestial bodies could be ensouled or, if not, then acted upon by non-divine intelligence. I read somewhere, but don’t recall now (and couldn’t track it down), that some believed the ‘wandering stars’ were being pushed or pulled by inferior intelligences, i.e., an intelligence below angels but beyond humans.

10. Next, consider the antipodeans, who offer a remarkable analogue to contemporary NHIs. Long before modern concepts of aliens and Area 51, there were antipodeans and the ‘wild’ idea of people inhabiting lands across oceans. Some antipodes were even said to be people living on the underside of Earth. The theological objections to their existence were serious. Augustine (d. 430), to his credit, accepted the spherical geometry of the globe, but rejected antipodean inhabitation on Adamic grounds. In 748, Pope Zachary threatened a priest with excommunication for teaching “other men beneath the earth.” In short, such peoples couldn’t descend from Adam, couldn’t have heard the gospel, or couldn’t exist in a creation ordered outside the known world. Albert the Great, though, accepted antipodean inhabitation, and saw no theological problem with it. This debate serves as a structural rehearsal of the exoplanet debate, conducted on Earth, and it offers a rich historical precedent for our modern discussions about NHI. After the Europeans discovered the Americas, antipodes were no longer theoretical; instead, they became the ‘opposite Other.’ Will Christians today, who reject NHI, one day look like the medieval theologians whose position the discovery of the Americas falsified? In other words, will today’s theological reasons for denying NHI prove as fragile as yesterday’s reasons for denying antipodeans?

11. Next, we turn to folk Christian intelligences. These included creatures beyond angels and humans, such as fairies and elves. Davison cites these as evidence of “how cultures steeped in Christian theology have readily entertained that there is more to the sum of sentient life than the human species.” Granted, these are folk intelligences, not biblical, but I bring them up to demonstrate how Western Christians in the past enjoyed a more robust theological imagination than we do today.

12. Finally, contemporary research into “diverse intelligences” is prompting a return to questions Christians used to ask easily. The octopus is, in some respects, a non-human intelligence sharing our planet right now. Artificial Intelligence, with all its rapid advances, is another example. I hesitate to apply the term “intelligence” to AI, though, and anticipate a future where Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will far surpass the Turing Test, convince many of its sentience, and compel us to adopt a term like “Alternative Intelligence,” lest we be seen as bigoted Luddites. Richard Dawkins’s recent misidentification of LLM output with genuine consciousness is an example of that initial step.7 (Neo-Darwinian materialists, it seems, are especially vulnerable to make this error.)

What This Taxonomy Tells Us

This taxonomy, while perhaps not perfect nor exhaustive, offers a framework for understanding how Christians have historically considered other worlds and NHIs. Two consistent patterns emerge.

First, the primary resistance to other worlds was almost always scientific rather than theological. As Davison observes, what often “held people back was the science of the day, not the theology.” Today, it’s exactly reversed.

Second, where genuine theological objections did surface, they were almost entirely Christological. Whether human beings are smarter than the octupus was never in question.

But something changed.

When Christians today argue—or, better, worry—about non-human intelligence, the question that animates them isn’t “What does this mean for the Incarnation?” but “What does this mean for us?” There’s an undercurrent of anxiety that Christians in the past didn’t seem to feel.

Between roughly the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, the educated Christian West moved from questioning whether other worlds and other lives existed to broadly accepting that they did, or might. Trollope’s Barchester Towers is a snapshot of that shift, which had already occurred at the level of popular sensibility. We wouldn’t have War of the Worlds or Star Wars or Dune without that shift.

But, in very recent history, we stand at a new inflection point regarding NHI more broadly. Confirmed exoplanetary microbial life—which is, by most astrobiologists’ estimates, decades (not centuries) away—will force a change in the conversation. So will the possibility of confirmed exoplanetary rational life. Obviously, whatever phenomena lie behind the well-attested but poorly-explained UAP sightings—now under congressional and Department of War investigation—are at the forefront. Also at the forefront, as I alluded to earlier, is the moral status of advanced terrestrial non-human intelligences, i.e., AGI representing another ‘species’ of NHI altogether.

This is the inflection point I spoke about earlier: 21st-century Christians, I think, need to make the same move Mrs. Bold had already made by 1857. We need to move from questioning the existence of non-human intelligence to accepting it as a theoretically live option, and a probable feature of the cosmos God has made. Because if we don’t, then I predict three failure modes will follow:

First, the dismissive or condescending posture. Many Christians handle questions about NHI with a weary smirk: “The Bible doesn’t teach that.” This posture confuses the absence of explicit biblical teaching with the presence of biblical prohibition. The educated public knows science is moving; philosophers, scientists, and militaries take these questions seriously. When the church alone treats them as beneath comment, we look exactly like what Sagan accused us of being.

Second, the knee-jerk demonological reduction. A second contingent defaults to the conclusion that all reported NHI must be demonic. I do think some NHI phenomena are demonic or demonically-influenced—some abduction stories can’t be squared away, to me, without it—so, spiritual discernment is real and necessary. But the wholesale reduction is a category error. It treats a vast set of phenomena—some odd but prosaic sightings, some misidentified terrestrial craft, some possible life from other planets or dimensions, some perceptual or psychological, some exotic physics, some indeed spiritual—as if they were one thing. The medieval tradition was much more careful: angels, demons, antipodeans, fairies, and inhabitants of other worlds were distinguished from each other. We’ve lost that taxonomic discipline.

Third, the forfeiture of the conversation. This worries me most, as a pastor. When Christians refuse to engage NHI seriously, the conversation doesn’t stop—it happens without us. And it happens in the hands of secular materialists, who cast religion as obsolete, e.g., Mick West and Neil deGrasse Tyson; through scholars like Diana Pasulka, whose work reads UFO phenomena through a religious-but-post-Christian lens; among influencers and podcasters whose theology is non-extant or, at the very least, borrowed and thin, e.g., Joe Rogan and Shawn Ryan; and via New Age and esoteric movements happy to offer their own framing, e.g., Raelianism. The young Christian told the church has nothing to say about NHI will not conclude NHI is unimportant. She will conclude the church is.

The tradition I’ve been mapping, inspired by Davison, isn’t a defensive crouch; it’s the opposite. Aquinas, Cusa, Vaurouillon, Baxter, and “Mrs. Bold” could entertain widespread non-human intelligence without their faith being shaken, and without ceding the conversation to anyone else. They had a taxonomy, built from a theology of creation generous enough to hold whatever showed up. And, in turn, they enjoyed the confidence that whatever God had made, God could also speak about, and so could we.

The short version of my argument across this series is that something happened between the time of our theological ancestors and the present day that taught us to locate human uniqueness in intelligence. We started calling ourselves Homo sapiens. We made rationality the criterion of human worth. And then, when astronomy, biology, and now artificial intelligence began to suggest rationality is less scarce than we had assumed, we panicked.

The Christian faith offers a different account of what makes us unique. It doesn’t depend on our being the smartest things in the room.

It never did.

But that’s for the subsequent essays.

For now, I’d like to answer the teased question put to Mrs. Bold: “Why shouldn’t there be a race of salamanders in Venus?”

Because we know now that they’re not the sort of creature that could survive on Venus, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t survive elsewhere.

And if they could, what else?

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From a Torah scroll leaf containing Numbers 15:32–16:31. This leaf was gifted to me by a friend years ago.

Mark Twain once quipped that if Joseph Smith had left out “and it came to pass,” the Book of Mormon “would have been only a pamphlet.” It’s not quite that extreme, but I get why he said it. In the first edition, published in 1830, the phrase appears (I believe) over 1,000 times. “And it came to pass is,” to put it mildly, “annoyingly pervasive.”1

But what’s this phrase actually doing? And does the Book of Mormon use it the way the Bible does?

My attention was recently drawn back to the Book of Mormon’s pervasive “and it came to pass” after stumbling upon an interesting book by a Hebrew scholar from Yale Divinity School, Joel Baden, called Lost in Translation.

In it, Baden calls “and it came to pass” a classic case of “Bible-ese,” language that has “fallen out of use almost entirely, except in the Bible or in texts that are trying to sound old-fashioned or fancy.”2 According to him, the KJV’s “and it came to pass” is essentially a dressed-up rendering of way’hi, a Hebrew form of the verb “to be.” The translators saw a subjectless verb, supplied the generic “it,” rendered the waw as the conventional “and,” and then, as Baden puts it, “basically fancied it up” to get “and it came to pass.”3

But the phrase isn’t necessary in English. When “and it came to pass” appears in the KJV, it introduces a temporal clause, or a “when” clause. The function of way'hi is to signal that everything following it comes later, or afterwards. It’s like a timestamp. KJV translators, for whatever reason, chose to preserve that construction. Modern translations, like the NIV and NRSV, make a different call, and omit “and it came to pass” entirely, putting the temporal clause in past tense, and then move on.

So, we have:

“And it came to pass, as Aaron spake unto the whole congregation of the children of Israel, that they looked toward the wilderness, and, behold, the glory of the Lord appeared in the cloud.” - Exodus 16:10, KJV

or

“And as soon as Aaron spoke to the whole congregation of the people of Israel, they looked toward the wilderness, and behold, the glory of the Lord appeared in the cloud.” - Exodus 16:10, ESV

All you need to do is drop “and it came to pass” (and the accompanying “that”), and voila.

Which leads me back to the Book of Mormon.

I’ve read LDS scholars who point to “and it came to pass” as evidence of the Book of Mormon’s ancient Semitic origins, noting its resemblance to the Hebrew way’hi. But Baden’s analysis raises an interesting question: Does the Book of Mormon actually use the phrase the way Hebrew does?

In 1 Nephi 12, for example, the phrase “and it came to pass” is used five times in a row to move the narrative along. (I chose this passage because there are many “and it came to pass”es back-to-back, but the pattern I’m about to describe appears throughout the Book of Mormon.) These phrases, according to Baden, are apparently unnecessary, given that English doesn’t need a sentence-opening tense marker (English modifies verbs with ‘-ed’ endings and helper verbs like “was” and “had”). The Book of Mormon, however, includes them.

Why? I have no clue.

Maybe the Book of Mormon reflects a source text that used a way’hi-like phrase more frequently than biblical Hebrew. Maybe the phrase reflects reformed Egyptian narrative conventions that simply operated differently than Hebrew ones. Maybe it’s an oral formula, so way’hi is like a mnemonic device (I vaguly recall reading this somewhere in LDS literature). Maybe it’s a feature of the author’s natural prose style, internalized from years of KJV reading and then applied consistently regardless of context. Maybe the author emulated KJV language without fully understanding how way’hi functioned.

Who knows?

Let’s take for granted, though, that the Book of Mormon is what it claims to be, i.e., a translation of an ancient Semitic text. What’s the difference between how the King James Bible uses “and it came to pass” when compared to the Book of Mormon?

That’s the question Baden raised in my mind, anyway.

Here’s my thoughts.

The Phrase That Came to Pass

When you read “and it came to pass,” ask yourself what follows it. Is it a temporal clause—a “when” clause that sets the scene—or is it something else?

In Genesis 39:7, the KJV reads:

“And it came to pass after these things, that his master’s wife cast her eyes upon Joseph.”

What follows “and it came to pass”? A temporal clause: “after these things.” The simple phrase sets the scene in time. Of course, the sentence has a subject (the master’s wife) and an action (casting her eyes on Joseph), but those arrive later, after the temporal clause, in a subordinate clause introduced by “that.”

Now, look at 1 Nephi 12:1:

“And it came to pass that the angel said unto me: Look, and behold thy seed.”

What follows “and it came to pass”? The word “that,” and then immediately a subject and action: “the angel said unto me.” There’s no temporal clause. No “when” marker. The phrase introduces an action directly and immediately.

That’s different.

Let’s try another pair.

Exodus 12:41:

“And it came to pass at the end of the four hundred and thirty years, even the selfsame day it came to pass, that all the hosts of the Lord went out from the land of Egypt.”

What follows “and it came to pass”? A temporal clause: “at the end of the four hundred and thirty years.” The Israelites leaving Egypt is the event, but it comes later. The phrase sets the temporal stage first.

1 Nephi 12:2:

“And it came to pass that I beheld multitudes gathered together to battle, one against the other.”

What follows “and it came to pass”? The word “that,” and then: “I beheld multitudes.” A subject (Nephi) doing something (beholding). Neither temporal clause nor stage-setting. The phrase just goes straight to the action.

Different again.

One more example set.

Judges 11:4

“And it came to pass in process of time, that the children of Ammon made war against Israel.”

What follows “and it came to pass”? A temporal clause: “in process of time.” The Ammonites making war is the event, but—once more—it arrives after the scene has already been set.

1 Nephi 12:4

“And it came to pass that I saw a mist of darkness on the face of the land of promise.”

What follows “and it came to pass”? The word “that” and then: “I saw a mist of darkness.” A subject (Nephi) doing something (seeing).

Again, straight to the action.

Ok… an analogy, for those who’ve stuck with me but are confused. The Bible uses “and it came to pass” like a theater program note—“Act II: Some Time Later”—before the curtain ever rises. You’re in your seats, you see a stage veiled by a black curtain, knowing that whatever comes, it’s later on than before. The Book of Mormon, however, uses “and it came to pass” like the curtain is already going up, actors already on scene, in motion, speaking, doing right now.

The Bible prompts you to pay attention to whats about to happen; whereas, the Book of Mormon moves you along the action as it’s taking place.

I find this interesting because this pattern is fairly consistent. It holds across all five verses of 1 Nephi 12:1–5. Every “and it came to pass” attaches directly to action. None of them are followed by temporal clauses, i.e., the “when” markers that always follow way’hi in the Hebrew Bible. And 1 Nephi 12 isn’t an anomaly. Reading through the major narrative sections, from the Lehite exodus in 1 Nephi through the Jaredite history in Ether, I kept finding the same pattern.

Granted, I’m aware that LDS scholars have made detailed cases for the phrase’s Hebraic character—I alluded to them earlier—and, admittedly, engaging that work properly would take more than this short essay. But the pattern as I read it is consistent. Nearly every “and it came to pass” I found introduces a direct action without temporal framing. The construction is generally “and it came to pass that [subject] + [verb],” where the phrase simply marks that something happened next.

So, here’s where I’m at: the “and it came to pass” phrase that was designed to orient the reader in time has become, in most cases with the Book of Mormon, simply a way of saying “and then.”

So, then, back to my original question: What’s the difference between how the King James Bible uses “and it came to pass” when compared to the Book of Mormon?

In the King James Bible, “and it came to pass” introduces a temporal clause; whereas, in the Book of Mormon, it links a chain of action.

Similar enough to be mistaken for each other, but different enough to be worth noticing. It’s the subtle difference between “back then” vs. “and then.”

Now, what to make of that difference is a question I’ll leave to the reader.

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On April 4th, I attended the General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for the very first time. For those unfamiliar, General Conference is a semi-annual gathering in which Latter-day Saint leaders—Seventies, Apostles, the First Presidency—address the entire LDS Church through a series of talks delivered in Salt Lake City and broadcast globally. This conference, in specific, was unique because it was Dallin H. Oaks’s first as the newly sustained president of the Church.

Part of the reason for my attendance was to document my experience. Jeff McCullough, of Hello Saints, captured it all here:

Here are my Top 3 takeaways.

1. The protesters were a lot more diverse than it appears.

The first thing I encountered were protesters. There weren’t as many as I anticipated, only a handful of small groups (2–3 people) with signs and tracts attempting to reach Latter-day Saints, whether to discuss the gospel, dissuade them from attending the conference, or simply condemn them to hell. Most of the protesters I met were some form of Protestant, mainly evangelical, but I met a Roman Catholic, which surprised me.

I didn’t anticipate was how diverse the protesters were. From the outside, they seem to be a homogenized group of people. Some protesters were there, in my opinion, for an honorable reason and doing things in a godly, respectful way. They were having genuine convictions about the LDS Church and its members that compel them to bear witness to the gospel, especially through calm, respectful conversation. Even though apologetics and street evangelism are not my cup of tea, I think as long as it’s done in gentleness and respect, there’s a genuineness that shouldn’t be dismissed.

There were, however, protesters I found to be off-putting. Most of them, in fact. There were a pair of men, in particular, callously hurling their judgment on Latter-day Saints—often before small children—and even managed to lump Jeff’s damnation in there as well. I can’t square this approach when Christians are commanded to “let your reasonableness be known to everyone” (Phil. 4:5) and to put on “compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience” (Col. 3:12). I’ve never been convinced that yelling contentiously at people is fidelity to these commands. For what it’s worth, I stood behind a LDS family who’d gone through that gauntlet. A son was discussing the contentious men with his mother. She asked what he thought of them. “They seem angry and lost,” he replied.

Finally, there were a minority of protesters that, frankly, I think were processing spiritual trauma. They had deep resentment and anger toward the LDS Church, and they were there to vent and rage. It’s this last group, in particular, that I had a pastoral heartbreak over.

They won’t heal this way.

2. What are we saved from?

While listening to the talks—eight in total—I began to notice a theme. Each talk, in its own way, established and reaffirmed that we are saved exclusively through Christ’s atonement, i.e., there aren’t other Saviors, no other methods or ways, that do not lead through him. As Eduardo Ortega put it, quoting the Book of Mormon, we come to faith “relying wholly upon the merits of him who is mighty to save” (2 Nephi 31:19). The purpose of that salvation, as I heard it consistently framed, is covenant-making and covenant-keeping toward celestial glory. Brian Holmes put it plainly: “Covenant blessings flow from ongoing faithfulness, not merely from past participation.”

I’m compressing nuanced language here, but the pattern I kept encountering went something like: Because of Christ, if you exercise faith, repent, receive ordinances, make and keep covenants with God, and endure to the end, you will progress toward celestial glory.

And, while we were told may times that we are saved for celestial glory, I noticed a general absence of what we are saved from. Sin was mentioned—Wan-Liang Wu titled his talk after King Lamoni’s father’s prayer, “I will give away all my sins to know thee” (Alma 22:18), and Holmes referenced sin in passing—but the weight of the session fell on the destination of salvation more than its necessity. I didn’t hear much about enmity toward God, the moral guilt that makes atonement urgent, or the wrath from which Christ rescues us.

I want to be careful here because I only heard one session. I’m not characterizing the whole conference. But, from my perspective, I couldn’t help but to notice how evangelical Christianity tends to begin with the bad news—i.e., our sin brings us under condemnation and judgment, from which we need rescue—before the good news makes any sense. The salvation being proclaimed at General Conference felt oriented differently, less as rescue from condemnation and more as empowerment toward transformation.

3. Abiding in false vines.

Hands down, my favorite moment came from Ulisses Soares, speaking on John 15, the image of abiding in Christ as the true vine. I love this passage because branches don’t white-knuckle the vine, hoping to remain attached, banking on being good enough for the vine to accept and love and keep them. Branches are simply nourished by the vine and, in turn, bear fruit. And fruit is for the benefit of others, not necessarily the vine. Likewise, we don’t, by our own power, remain in Christ through sheer determination; rather, we receive it by faith alone in Christ alone, abiding in all God’s promises that come through him, and the fruit that results is for the edification of others, not him.

Now, Soares made an observation I hadn’t considered before. If Christ calls himself the true vine, the modifier implies the existence of false vines, just as “true Christ” implies “false christs.” So, in a world with many different voices and ideas and hopes and gods and idols, we’re constantly tempted to ‘graft’ ourselves to other sources of nourishment that actually don’t.

Excellent point. I was genuinely edified, and even convicted. What false vines have I been drawing from? What overlooked vice, what persistent distraction, have I been abiding in while telling myself it’s harmless?

Worth considering.

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I’ve made the trip thirteen times now, from Alabama to Utah with evangelical college students sacrificing their spring break to dialogue with Latter-day Saint—or “Mormon”—college students.

Why in the world would they do that? is the question I always get. Spring break on the Gulf Coast means the first warm, sandy beaches we’ve seen since October. But these students apparently prefer cold, wet mountains.

Why?

Because they understand that the Greatest Commandment calls us to two things: to love your neighbor enough to understand them, and love God enough to tell them what He’s done in your life.

This year’s trip, I was able to witness just that, and more.

Personally, it included podcast appearances to discuss my book 40 Questions About Mormonism, catching up with old friends, making new ones, and hanging out with one of the most genuinely diverse group of people I’ve encountered in over a decade of doing this. I was even able to have a brief exchange with the Church’s newest apostle.

But, honestly, the highlight of the trip for me was seeing so many students in prayer so often. In all my times to Utah, I’ve never witnessed so much of it. Our students prayed alongside Latter-day Saint students, whether it was before meals or after hard conversations or one-on-one for reasons I don’t know. I never coached them on it; they just did it. And, I think, it brought a sort of peace and reverent weight to the whole thing.

I was especially impressed with one encounter, in specific. While most of the Latter-day Saint students we encountered were confident in their Church, one person our students met had grown uncertain in some of the particulars of the LDS faith, but not in the Lord Jesus. That’s a scary place to be, I imagine. It’s that moment when the floor feels ripped out from beneath you, and yet, you don’t want to let go of Christ. The students saw this person in their struggle and responded with empathy, gentleness, and grace. I think that moment alone was worth the trip because to meet and minister to someone in their faith struggle is an incredibly holy thing.

Over all, these students engaged with curiosity, conviction, and respect. They sat across from Latter-day Saints who hold their faith firmly, and rather than retreating into argument or obfuscation, they leaned in with curiosity, conviction, and respect. I can tell they asked questions worth asking, listened well, and left Utah with a richer understanding of lived Mormonism than most evangelicals twice their age will ever develop.

In the end, these students were pushed in what they believed, stretched in what they knew, and—I believe—sanctified in the process.

Cold mountains and all, I’d take this spring break over Gulf Coast beaches any day.

Note: The analysis contained in this essay represents the personal opinion and conjecture of the author. It is not presented as fact. All conclusions drawn are based solely on the author’s reading of publicly available texts and are offered as literary and textual criticism. The author makes no claim to have determined the origin or production method of any text discussed.

I’ve been following a really interesting story in the Latter-day Saint world, but you’ve probably not heard of it. It surrounds the incredible claims of David Taylor, aka Mikgah Ogichidaa,1 or “Kind Warrior Man.”

I wasn’t all that interested in the story until I learned about the incredible claims he’s made. Over the past year and a half—I believe that’s the timeframe—Indigenous lodges spanning the American continents have been quietly releasing a flood of sacred records, which, Taylor says, corroborate (and in some cases predate) the Book of Mormon. What began as an expectation of a dozen or so texts exploded last fall when sixty records arrived at once. By December 2025, at least, the total had grown to thousands of pages.2

Okay, I thought to myself. You have my attention.

But, why are they all being released now?

Taylor was pretty blunt about it. The records are, in his words, “a last ditch effort to try to breathe air onto an ember that’s almost gone”—a kind of eschatological ultimatum addressed to traditional Christians, Jews, Latter-day Saints, and LDS restoration branches alike to “get your crap together and become one.”

The records themselves, Taylor explains, are the surviving remnants of an ancient pan-American library system. These records were moved between various locations for centuries before being transcribed onto other media, like birch bark. The most dramatic of the lot is what Taylor calls the “Record of Merunhi,” which he identified with the Book of Mormon character, Moroni.

Best of all, these records are accessible—for $9.99 a month—through a mobile app called Sacred Records.

Naturally, I decided to read some.

As I perused my options, I was drawn toward two texts, in specific.

First, obviously, the “Record of Merunhi.” That’s fascinating to me because, in my area of specialty, a Mormon prophet named James Strang also produced ancient records in 1845, called the Voree Record, with a Moroni-like character, the Rajah Manchou of Vorito.

And, because I’m a preacher, the second text that caught my attention was the Sermon of Yehowzhowa. The name is what caught my attention because Yehowzhowa appears to be an indigenized rendering of the tetragrammaton, or divine name, e.g., YHWH, Yehovah, Jehovah.

Has Taylor really published previously unknown records from Moroni and a sermon from the incarnate God himself, delivered in the ancient Americas?

I had to see for myself.

click

It didn’t take long before I felt like something was off, like the text has a silicon texture to it. To be frank, after a couple of minutes, my thought was, “This must have been written by AI,” or at least heavily revised by AI. So, I lost interest in reading them altogether.

And I might have left it at that, except for one thing: the records are locked behind a subscription. Someone’s making money off this. That’s fine, in one sense—people subscribe to all sorts of writers and texts, e.g., newspapers, Substacks, etc. But it nagged me that there’s a subscription to read text—apparently Christian scriptural text, at that—which is being passed off as ancient, yet, I suspect, bears the prints of AI.

So, I had to ask:

Ok, here’s what I observed.

The Depiction of Indigeneity

The first red flag for me was the Sermon of Yehowzhowa’s portrayal of Indigenous people.

The opening scene is cinematic:

“The people gathered at dawn, their feet pressed into the wet earth along the riverbank. The mist rose from the falls like smoke from a sacred fire, and the roar of the water filled the valley with a voice older than memory.”

Having set the seen, the text then fills the scene with characters:

“Children, warriors, and elders leaned forward, listening to every word of Yehowzhowa.”

“The people listened in silence, some leaning on staffs, some holding the hands of children, some bowing slightly in respect.”

And, at the conclusion of Yehowzhowa’s sermon at the Great Falls:

“The people remained in silence long after he finished, feeling the spray of the falls upon their faces, the warmth of the fires, and the hum of life around them.”

Notice that the people in this text don’t speak. We don’t know what they’re like aside from their actions, or, better, their inactivity.

Granted, the Sermon on the Mount is similar. The listeners likewise don’t speak as Jesus teaches them. But the Evangelist’s aim was different than whomever wrote the Yehowzhowa sermon. The author of the Gospel of Matthew simply compiled a body of Christ’s teachings; whereas, the author of the Sermon of Yehowzhowa crafted a fully dramatized episode with atmospheric staging and symbolic choreography.

And that’s what threw up the first red flag for me.

The function of people in the Sermon of Yehowzhowa narrative is to be an audience, a specific kind of audience, arranged with reverent bodies, respectful of a divine figure, faces sprayed with mist and bodies warmed by fires. Basically, the audience is defined entirely by their attentiveness to that figure and their relationship to their natural surroundings.

In my opinion, this depiction maps on nicely to what scholars have called the so-called “Noble Savage,” i.e., the image of Indigenous persons as naturally pure, spiritually attuned, passively receptive, existing in harmonious relationship with nature, etc. They aren’t complex, like the Europeans colonists; rather, they’re simple, natural, humble, quiet.

The “Noble Savage” theme becomes more pronounced as the reader “looks around” the scene. Consider what’s present in both the Sermon of Yehowzhowa (just Sermon, from now on) and the Record of Merunhi: creeks, falls, stones, cedar, moss, soot, grass, mist, “sacred” fire, wildfire, stars, moon, hawks, fish, seeds, berries, roots, staffs, elders, hunters, warriors, bones, arrows, drums.

There’s also a candle (see Merunhi 3:33) and a book (see Merunhi 3:43), which seem a bit anachronistic for a first century indigenous American.

Anyway, consider how these elements combine in a dramatic moment of the Sermon:

“Yehowzhowa knelt to tend the embers with his fingers. ‘See the fire,’ he said. ‘A spark warms the body and comforts the spirit.’”

These are all generic signifiers of Indigeneity, i.e., images of nature, hierarchy, and reverence that could come from almost any northeastern woodlands setting, or, rather, from a modern cultural imaginary of what it would have looked like.

The landscape feels like a set, not a setting.

And, like the people, the set feels like a specific kind, i.e., a distinctly Book of Mormon set.

Turning to the Record of Merunhi, that text features props like sealed records and records buried in hills. It mentions a “seer” (see Meruni 1:4) and a “prophet” (Merunhi 2:50). Even the language is Book of Mormon-ish, with the occasional “and it came to pass” (see Merunhi 1:12; 1:27; 5:1; 6:1), “testimony” (Merunhi 4:13), “covenant” (Merunhi 5:20), and the “latter days” (Merunhi 6:33).

What the Detectors Found

After reading these two texts, I wondered if AI had something to do with their generation or revision. So, I ran the Sermon through six AI-detection tools, and the results were unanimous:

• Pangram: 100% AI written.

• Originality.ai: 100% AI written.

• GPTZero: 100% AI written.

• Phrasely: 97% AI written.

• Grammarly: 90% AI written.

• QuillBot: 88% AI written.

Six different tools with different methodologies, the same conclusion. The Sermon, according to these detectors, was likely generated or affected by a large language model (LLM, like ChatGPT)—whether full generation, partial generation, or heavy revision—with an average confidence of 96.5%.

I chose these detectors for their reliability. As far as I can tell, Pangram, for example, is used by the University of Chicago and The New York Times utilizes Originality.

Now, I’ll note that AI-text detectors aren’t flawless. My work occasionally is flagged as AI-generated. I’ve seen my own pre-ChatGPT scholarly work flagged as AI-generated, which says something about the limitations of these tools. But when six different tools—trained on different datasets, tuned with different methods—arrive at the same conclusion with an average confidence level above 95%?

It’s not proof, sure, but it’s certaintly smoke.

So, I returned to the texts to examine them, line-by-line, to see what the detectors see.

The Small Tells: Sentence-Level Features

Let’s start by returning to the opening line of the Sermon:

“The people gathered at dawn, their feet pressed into the wet earth along the riverbank.”

I think this sentence is notable for what it’s not. “Feet pressed into the wet earth” isn’t the observation of a witness; rather, it’s how a narrator would put it. More specifically, it’s an example of a technique so common in contemporary creative writing that it has its own maxim: “Show, don’t tell.”

Anyone whose been in creative writing for more than a few minutes knows that rule, and so did the author of the Sacred Records, apparently, because they deploy the same technique elsewhere:

“I knelt, and the soil was warm as breath, and I pressed the plates into the hollow we had prepared”

“I, Merunhi, carry the record pressed to my heart”

“I press my face to the earth and thank the Father of Heaven”

“I pressed the final mark into the plate and felt the warm metal”

“Pressed” is rendering the physical experience of activity so the reader feels the action, i.e., the resistance, the weight, the contact between body and surface. This feels more like a modern compositional instinct. In a genuine ancient record, we’d expect the action simply to happen.

Perhaps the most dramatic “show, don’t tell” moment comes at the burial scene in chapter 6. Merunhi narrates burying the plates in real time, complete with a poetic closing image—“the earth closed upon [the plates] like one keeping a secret for love’s sake.”

It reads like a cinematic final shot, which is fine, but it’s impossible because Merunhi is describing the burial of the very plates he’s writing on. The record describes its own interment.

It would be as if I wrote the scene of my final moments in life: “And as I laid there, the light of life fading, I squeezed my wife’s hand, bade her farewell, and breathed my last breath. I died. My wife leaned forward, kissed my forehead, and wished me sweet rest until the Lord should return, then left the room.”

At some point, I had to stop writing, because I died.

And, at some point, Merunhi can’t continue narrating himself burying the plates because he buried them.

I suppose it could be argued that Merunhi wrote this scene on a separate set of plates after the burial was complete, but that only relocates the problem. When and where were those records buried?

The more obvious explanation is the simpler one: the scene was written by a modern author who was unable to resist the dramatic pull of that powerful, closing scene. It’s a very touching moment, for sure, but it’s impossible to capture unless the narrator was third-person omniscient, and not Merunhi.

Anyway, the cumulative effect of these moments is a prose style that is consistently oriented toward the reader’s experience, like modern fiction, rather than the preservation of information, like ancient texts.

Jacobean Gear Shifting

The Book of Mormon is, famously, written in Jacobean English, i.e., it sounds like the King James Bible. The Record of Merunhi exhibits a similar sentence-level feature, but inconsistently because the register of the prose shifts between Jacobean formal English and contemporary informal English, without any discernable reason as to why.

Archaic constructions—e.g., “thou hast,” “thine,” “behold,” “it came to pass”—appear alongside phrasing that is recognizably modern in cadence and form, i.e., how they sound and what they’re talking about.

Consider these examples:

“they know not how tired the world has grown of pride”

“If I have sinned before Thee in the haste of my fear, forgive me, for fear is the last weakness of the faithful.”

“covered the sky with smoke and called it progress”

“the stars were charted as commerce”

“the world will grow clever and forget simplicity”

“in that world, people bless the very systems that consume them . . . when souls collapse in silence, statistics call it progress”

The first is particularly telling: “they know not” is Jacobean; “how tired the world has grown” is the voice of a contemporary essayist. Same with the second example: “sinned before Thee in haste” sounds like it’s from 1626; “fear is the last weakness of the faithful,” like it’s from 2026.

As to form, the remaining examples deploy the distinctly modern concept of ironic progress—i.e., the idea that industrial civilization mistakes destruction for advancement—which is a post-Enlightenment critique, not a first-century one. “Called it progress” and “charted as commerce” and “grow clever, forget simplicity” are the formulations of someone writing about modernity from outside it, not of someone writing before modernity existed. The critique of people praising the “systems that consume them” and “statistics call it progress” read like lines lifted from a contemporary essay about late-stage capitalism, not from a first-century Indigenous record-keeper who’d never seen a factory.

I simply struggle to believe a first-century author would have been critiquing industrialization, but, I suppose, a “Noble Savage” with visions of the future might.

There are many other passages that feel very modern.

“I am hunted, yes—but I am also carried.”

“I feel it speaking in its motion, saying: keep going, keep going, keep going—because forgiveness flows even when men dam it with their fear.”

“Let them call Me by an name that leads them home; I do not dwell in syllables but in surrender.”

“loving without ledger” (I found this phrase all over the internet, by the way.)

“On the path I pass a field where the dead lie like punctuation; I stop for one—only one, because that is all my strength can life.”

That last example is especially interesting since ancient texts lacked punctuation marks, so Merunhi wouldn’t know what a punctuation mark was.

The Not X, But Y Saturation

The Record of Merunhi relies heavily on a “Not X, But Y” sentence construction, which is, I think, called a correctio in rhetoric. It’s a useful device for any argument because it ‘self-corrects’ to raise the stakes as the speaker advances their argument. Used in moderation, it’s a powerful rhetorical device, but LLMs have learned the wrong lesson: they think we humans like them all the time, like em-dashes, apparently.

So, when I see that the Record of Merunhi use correctio more than thirty times, it’s arresting for the reading experience. For example, notice all the Not-Buts in these ten examples:

“Tell them that peace is not an event but a posture.”

“I ask not for safety but for steadiness, not for victory but for usefulness.”

“Peace is not the weakness of the timid but the wisdom of the eternal.”

“I knew that forgiveness is not rest but renewed labor.”

“true strength is not in the loud defense of faith but in its quiet endurance”

“teaching my own soul that repentance is not sorrow alone, but the turning of thewhole heart”

“The Messiah conquered not by striking but by being struck.”

“repentance leads not backward but forward”

“We do not defend God; we remember him.”

“This is what repentance feels like—not punishment, cleansing.”

Taken individually, any single correctio is defensible. But the pattern becomes characteristic with an aggregate of thirty-plus instances.

To be fair, the Gospels themselves contain Not-Buts.

“I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matthew 5:17).

“The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve” (Mark 10:45).

“I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me” (John 6:38).

So, to be clear, the construction has genuine ancient precedent in sacred literature; it isn’t inherently modern or artificial.

The difference is one of frequency, or, better, of density. The Gospels deploy correctio sparingly, as a pointed rhetorical moment. In the Sermon, however, Not-But is practically the default mode.

The Triads

There are a lot of triads in the Sermon and Record of Merunhi, i.e., lists or parallel phrases grouped in threes.

“I walk among their ruins, unseen, writing by the light of their fires.”

“I confess the quiet sins—resentment, superiority, the softness that wants to look holy while staying safe.”

“whether my memory was clear enough, my spirit steady enough, my hand sure enough”

“If you must fight, fight your own cruelty; if you must conquer, conquer your greed; if you must die, die forgiving.”

“to hope when reason forbids; to encourage when all encouragement seems foolish; to believe that mercy is strength.”

“The word will always find new ways to produce its harvest; it is a seed of extraordinary creativity; forgiveness is the cornerstone of understanding.”

Now, triads every now and then are to be expected, but, as with the Not-Buts, the frequency and density here is something else. Triads have a long history in rhetoric because they’re effective, and that’s what LLMs have learned:

“Government of the people, by the people, for the people.” — Abraham Lincoln, 1863

“Stop, Drop, and Roll.” — FEMA, 1970s

“Every breath you take, every move you make, every bond you break.” — The Police, 1983

So, the problem isn’t that triads exist; rather, it’s that triads exist so frequently.

My thought, here, is that LLMs have learned what we moderns prefer in our language structures—Not-Buts, triads—but they haven’t learned what our ancestors preferred, so that’s why we’re seeing these so often.

Conclusion

These observations—the “Noble Savage” depiction, the cinematic “show, don’t tell” prose, the Jacobean gear-shifting and soft critique of industrialization, all the correctio and the triads—are, I think, why the six AI-text detectors averaged a 96.5% AI-generation score for these two texts from the Sacred Records app.

I want to be clear, here. If taken individually, any one of these could be coincidence, or a false reading on my part. But the problem is they don’t occur in isolation; rather, they occur together, over and over, across two texts both claiming ancient provenance as part of a larger corpus presently residing behind a subscription-based paywall.

I’ll leave readers to draw their own conclusions about whether the cost is worth it.

With 40 Questions About Mormonism releasing in a matter of days, I wanted to take some time to reflect on how I’ve grown through the process. Writing is more learning than information sharing, and that was certainly the case with this project.

Over the next three weeks, I’ll be sharing some of those reflections.

Up first…

Three Things That Changed How I Think About Joseph Smith

I spent the better part of a year reading many of his journals and personal correspondence. (Special thanks to the Joseph Smith Papers team for making that possible.)

When I did, I was intentional about not reading the revelations he produced or his doctrinal constructions. I read those, of course, but part of me wanted to see the mundane, day-to-day Joseph Smith. To just see him visit with friends, preside over weddings and funerals, pray over sick children, reflect on community tensions, etc.

Honestly, I was expecting to see a man with an abundance of ambition, maybe getting a sneak-peak into the inner-workings of a charismatic religious entrepreneur building an empire. But what I found instead surprised me. Not a prophet, but not a con man either.

Something altogether different.

Joseph Smith Sincerely Desired to Heal Sectarianism

The first thing that changed is this: I believe Joseph Smith was genuinely concerned about his own soul and the fractured state of Christianity on the American frontier of his day. That’s not a statement about whether he was right—I don’t think he was—but about whether he was sincere.

Skeptics of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I’ve found, often assume that Joseph Smith was insane or a charlatan, or a little bit of both. The conman angle is especially popular because it’s cleaner and easier to dismiss.

But, boy, that framing makes it really hard to square away with all the historical details.

Joseph’s early history reveals a young man formed in the Burned-Over District of upstate New York, a cauldron of spiritual ferment where revival fires blazed constantly and competing denominations promised conflicting paths to salvation. His mother, Lucy Mack Smith, remembered him as someone who “always seemed to reflect more deeply than common persons his age upon everything of a religious nature.”

(I don’t know why’d you lie about something like that.)

Joseph’s grandfather, Solomon Mack, underwent a dramatic conversion after years of resisting the gospel, finding rest in Christ after nightly visions and profound conviction of sin. Joseph Jr. found himself in remarkably similar spiritual territory. “I felt to mourn for my own sins and for the sins of the world,” he wrote in his earliest autobiographical account.

And that was compounded by a lack of trust and an abundance of spiritual confusion. He didn’t know which (if any) pastors or ministers or elders he could trust, since they all seemed to contradict one another—e.g., debates over baptism, Calvinism versus Arminianism, the proper mode of worship, the nature of conversion itself.

*Cue Ecclesiastes 1:9

The cacophony of competing voices is a feature of every age.

Most of us—to channel C.S. Lewis here—pick a room (denomination) in the “great hall” of Christianity, and settle in. We find a tradition, make peace with its ambiguities, and stay. But Joseph didn’t; he couldn’t. Rather than settling into one of the available rooms, he began to sense what his contemporaries—the budding Restorationists—called a universal apostasy “from the true and living faith,” evidenced by the “contentions and divisions” among those claiming Christ’s name.

That may sound abrasive, but, again, a lot of his contemporaries thought something similar. Alexander Campbell, for example, surveying the same fractured Protestant landscape, drew his own sharp conclusions about creedal Christianity and the church’s drift from its apostolic roots. “No creed but Christ” became that anti-creedal non-denominational denomination’s creed.

Granted, Joseph went considerably farther than Campbell—I discuss that in the book—but their sentiment, at least, rhymed. Both men looked at the same religious chaos and concluded that something had gone deeply, structurally wrong.

Joseph sincerely want to heal the sectarian nature of the Christianity in which he was raised.

It’s not hagiographic to admit that. Acknowledging his sincerity doesn’t validate his prophetic claims; it’s simply doing justice to the historical record. A man can be sincerely wrong—and I think he was because, ironically, he fractured Christianity even further—but recognizing his sincerity matters for how we understand what actually happened in the past and how we engage contemporary Latter-day Saints who respect and admire him.

The 100% “con man” narrative keeps us from grappling with the serious questions Joseph raised, and the genuine spiritual hunger he both experienced and exploited. If we want to understand why Mormonism succeeded and continues to thrive, we need to reckon with a Joseph Smith who actually believed what he was doing mattered for eternity.

Joseph Smith Was Not a “False Prophet” (With a Major Caveat)

The second thing that changed is how I think about the question itself. I no longer find it particularly helpful to ask whether Joseph Smith was a “true” or “false” prophet.

Hear me out.

When the Bible speaks of true prophets and false prophets, it’s addressing those who claim to speak God’s word to God’s covenant people within the framework of established revelation in the Old Covenant. True prophets like, Isaiah and Jeremiah, called Israel back to Torah faithfulness. False prophets like, Hananiah, prophesied falsely in God’s name. Both operated within the same covenant framework, and both addressed the same people with competing claims about the same God’s intentions. True prophets heralded—whether explicitly or implicitly—the coming of the messiah; false ones, what not to look out for.

But I don’t think that’s what Joseph was doing because he clearly envisioned himself as something more comprehensive.

Joseph claimed to be a latter-day prophet-apostle, modeling his office after Moses and the Twelve. The revelations he produced often emulated OT prophecy with their “hearken” and “behold” formulas, while his letters to scattered saints drew heavily on NT apostolic language and allusions. He described receiving divine words “even as Moses” and being appointed “to preside over the whole church and to be like unto Moses,” if Moses were also Peter. It’s as if Joseph claimed authority above the rank-and-file prophets of the OT.

And there is such an office, a Prophet of Prophets, so to speak. I don’t think Joseph was wrong to recognize that that kind of authority exists; rather, he was simply wrong to claim it.

You see, here’s the critical distinction: from a traditional Christian perspective, the office Joseph claimed is already occupied.

God “has spoken to us by his Son” in these last days (Heb 1:2). Christ is the Word of God incarnate (see John 1:1, 14). He has fulfilled all divine purposes and plans for redemption. The prophetic office, in its ultimate sense, belongs to Christ alone. Just as there is no High Priest on earth, nor King of the Kingdom of God on earth—because both are occupied by Christ—there is no Prophet on earth.

So, it’s not that Joseph Smith was a “false” prophet; he wasn’t a prophet to begin with.

Now, I know how that sounds to a Latter-day Saint—dismissive, a bit arrogant, as though I’m defining Joseph out of contention rather than engaging him seriously. That’s not my intention, and you won’t find that in the book. But consider what I’m actually saying: this is the most basic, most central reason most people aren’t Latter-day Saints. You either believe Joseph’s claims or you don’t.

And someone might object here by appealing to Jesus’s words: “You will recognize them [false prophets] by their fruits” (Matt. 7:16). Jesus seems to indicate that prophets exist, and we are to judge them by their fruit—some “true” prophets, some “false” prophets. So, shouldn’t we examine Joseph’s life to see the kind of fruit he produced, whether good or bad?

Ironically, I think this is like comparing apples to oranges.

In context, Jesus isn’t addressing whether someone legitimately occupies the office of Prophet; rather, he’s giving his disciples a practical test for discerning prophetic speech, or what the NT later identifies as the gift of prophecy, the Spirit-prompted utterance that edifies, exhorts, and comforts the church (see 1 Cor. 14:3). That’s a different thing than whether someone legitimately holds the office of Prophet that the Lord Jesus filled and fulfilled. His warning about fruits is diagnostic for words, not a credentialing mechanism for offices.

Imagine someone besides Donald Trump claiming to be the President of the United States. We wouldn’t call that person a “false president,” as though they were competing for a legitimately open position. We’d recognize they fundamentally misunderstand how the office works. It’s occupied, and their claim doesn’t engage with that reality.

Similarly, Joseph wasn’t competing to be a better or truer prophet within the biblical framework. He was claiming an authority that, from a traditional Christian view, is presently and finally filled in the Lord Jesus.

Just as there is no other High Priest besides Christ, nor King of Kings besides the Lord, there is no Prophet aside from Jesus.

Anyway, this is the position I have come to adopt.

Joseph Smith Was Very Pastoral

The third thing that changed is my appreciation for Joseph’s genuine care for his people. This is perhaps the most surprising shift because it requires saying something positive about a man whose theological legacy I find to be an incredible departure from historical Christian orthodoxy.

But I can’t deny what I read in his private journals and correspondence. In aggregate, they reveal dimensions of Joseph’s character that don’t fit neatly into the villain narrative many people prefer, myself included earlier in life.

He celebrated with newlyweds at weddings, attended the sick at risk to his own health, wept with mourners at funerals. He advocated for victims of domestic abuse, prayed over a crisis pregnancy, consoled a woman whose baby died on Christmas Eve, and, I’m assuming, later presided over the child’s funeral. If you’ve never done that, I can tell you, as a minster, it’s among the most emotionally painful experiences to endure. I’ve buried many faces I can’t remember, but I’ve never forgotten a single child’s face.

And Joseph’s hospitality was legendary—he received so many visitors that he sometimes complained of being “hindered by a multitude,” and yet still prayed, “May God grant to continue his mercies unto my house.”

Joseph Smith was a more hospitable man than I presently am, and that’s a convicting thought.

Moreover, Joseph cultivated sympathy for the afflicted, acted as advocate for the accused during church trials, and genuinely desired to alleviate poverty among his followers. “I feel myself bound to be a friend to all the sons of Adam,” he wrote, “whether they are just or unjust, they have a degree of my compassion and sympathy.”

I think Joseph wanted more than power and prestige. I think he wanted to be a sort of spiritual father figure to a people of his own, a leader who would care for them spiritually and temporally.

This pastoral dimension doesn’t erase his failures. He was, by his own admission, “but a man” who should not be expected to be perfect. But recognizing his pastoral instincts helps explain the fierce loyalty he inspired and the genuine love many followers felt for him even amid his failures.

More importantly for the LDS-evangelical dialogue, it helps us see that people weren’t drawn to Mormonism solely by novel doctrine or charismatic claims, as it sometimes the case in our framing. People were drawn to a community led by someone who—however much I disagree with his theology—demonstrated genuine care for their wellbeing.

I can’t unsee that in the record.

So What?

Ok, these three shifts—recognizing Joseph’s sincerity, moving beyond the true-or-false-prophet framework, and acknowledging his caring side—are big moves for me, personally, and I hope they are a more historically responsible and theologically precise engagement with Mormon origins.

None of this changes my conviction that Joseph Smith was wrong in his central claims. I still believe, for example, that the Book of Mormon is not ancient scripture. But it does change how I approach those convictions and how I invite others into the conversation. And it requires me to remember that real people—my LDS neighbors and friends—revere Joseph as a prophet of God.

Alright, friends, 40 Questions About Mormonism releases next Tuesday (!!!) and is available for pre-order now at Amazon.

In next week’s essay, I’ll explore three things that changed how I think about the Book of Mormon, including why I now believe there were, indeed, physical plates, and an interesting (I think at least) exegesis of the promise in Moroni 10.

The following week, I’ll turn to Mormon theology itself, and what Latter-day Saints might teach evangelicals about Gethsemane.

📘 Coming February 2026: 40 Questions About Mormonism

If you’ve appreciated this essay, you’ll love my forthcoming book, 40 Questions About Mormonism (Kregel Academic). It’s written for traditional Christians who want clear, charitable, and biblically faithful answers to the most common questions about the Latter-day Saint faith and tradition.

PRE-ORDER TODAY and download three free chapters while you wait.

Note: This essay is descriptive, not participatory. I’m writing as an observer, not necessarily a voice from within.

You’ve heard of the “counter-cult” movement, I’m sure.

It was a fixture of mid-20th century evangelicalism, a broadly defensive posture aimed at protecting Christians from groups deemed to teach heterodoxy and heresies. Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Science, Freemasonry, and myriad occult movements were all lumped together as targets. The goal was doctrinal inoculation, to build just enough literacy to draw intuitive boundaries and prevent evangelicals from converting.

In large measure, it succeeded. I still hear echoes of it today.

But I do mean echoes.

I think it’s apparent that the “counter-cult” movement has largely faded. Evangelical attention to the “cults” hasn’t, though. It’s returned in a new form, one I’ve started calling the contra-cult movement: a decentralized, entrepreneurial, and often digital form of evangelical engagement with religious groups historically labeled “cults” (e.g., Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses).

Notice the prefix change, from counter- to contra-.

Unlike the mid-20th century counter-cult movement—which aimed to protect evangelicals from heterodox groups through avoidance and inoculation—the contra-cult movement is characterized by an offensive posture: public-facing, algorithmically distributed content aimed at members of those groups. It operates without central authority, credentialing institutions, or canonical texts, relying instead on the dynamics of the digital age. Even if the interactions are in-person, they are recorded and uploaded for digital consumption.

So, what’s changed is not that engagement happens but how. In the last century, we’ve seen at least three distinct phases: the classic counter-cult movement, the momentary post-9/11 turn toward Islam, and the emerging contra-cult landscape. Each phase reflects the anxieties, media habits, and cultural pressures of its moment. The newest phase is no exception.

I’ll sketch the earlier two movements briefly before focusing on what’s taking shape now. My hope is to caution against repeating old patterns as evangelical engagement becomes increasingly digital and democratized.

Phase One: The Counter-Cult Movement

The counter-cult movement emerged in twentieth century and matured through the late twentieth century. Walter Martin’s Kingdom of the Cults became the reference text. Ministries, conferences, and publishers built infrastructure around a single task: protecting evangelicals from doctrinal drift. This defensive posture gained particular urgency during the Cold War, when many American evangelicals believed that Christian hegemony and purity kept Communism at bay. Protecting the flock from cults was, thus, both a pastoral and patriotic duty.

The best way to do so was, apparently, was to inform and discourage engagement. So, the audience wasn’t the heterodox group itself but the evangelical sitting in the pew. A key verse was 2 John 1:10-11: “If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not take them into your house or welcome them.” The posture was avoidance, not engagement.

I first learned about Mormonism because my church library stocked counter-cult materials and showed my youth group The God Makers. Like many evangelicals in that era, my initial awareness came from books and films designed to inoculate rather than inform. True, it gave me basic orientation to religious movements I’d never encounter otherwise—it wasn’t until my early 20s that I met a real live, bona fide Latter-day Saint—but it also meant my first impressions were shaped by uneven accuracy in wildly variable tones. Mormons, for example, were dupes and deceived. Best to stay away, unless you want to becoming like them. That being the case, I think the movement sometimes confused doctrinal disagreement with moral panic.

Still, it represented a coherent attempt to help evangelicals navigate nearby religious worlds, so I’m grateful for that. It assumed theological disagreement matters, and it does, so discernment is important, which it is. I just lament the fact that the counter-cult movement too often—at least as I’ve seen—instilled more suspicious fear of neighbor than genuine love for them.

You can read more about my thoughts on this here.

Phase Two: The Post-9/11 Turn Toward Islam

The second phase wasn’t an evolution so much as a redirection. After September 11, Islam replaced the “cults” as the primary religious concern in conservative evangelical discourse. The shift didn’t arise from doctrinal anxiety—I never met more than a handful of evangelicals who genuinly feared mass conversion to Islam. The anxiety was more about global politics and renewed debates about religion and national identity.

Engagement with Islam, then, was framed through geopolitics more than theology. Evangelicals who once worried about Jehovah’s Witness literature at their door suddenly worried about civilizational conflict. And we weren’t prepared of the sudden change, so we scrambled for guidance and got so-called “experts” like Ergun Caner, i.e., someone who claimed authority he didn’t have and was later exposed for making up elements of his testimony. Essentially, he filled an urgent need for evangelicals, and he said what we wanted to hear—he tickled our itching ears about the evils of Muslims. Eventually, we got more careful voices, but we started off on the wrong foot, for sure.

One of the unintended consequences of this momentary shift of attention was the atrophy of the counter-cult movement. The books stayed in print but weren’t replaced and only lightly revised, which is why evangelical apologetics in this area can taste so stale. You were more likely to hear a talk on Islam than Scientology at evangelical conferences. Unveiling Islam supplanted exposes on Mormonism. By the time the War on Terror wound down—troops drawn down in Iraq, ISIS collapsed, troops withdrew from Afghanistan, etc—two decades had passed. So, when evangelical attention finally returned to “cults” in the early 2020s, the landscape had changed completely.

Phase Three: The Rise of the Contra-Cult Movement

Within the last few years, evangelical attention has returned to the religious movements once labeled “cults,” but the form of engagement looks nothing like the world of Walter Martin. The contra-cult movement is public-facing, digital, and overwhelmingly decentralized. It thrives in algorithmic environments where anyone with a phone can become an interpreter, critic, or commentator on groups like Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, or Scientology.

I’ll focus on Mormonism for the rest of the essay, because that’s what I’m most familiar with.

What caused the change? I think there’s a bunch of reasons.

The COVID lockdowns, for starters, accelerated our online content consumption. Limited series like Under the Banner of Heaven and Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey brought “cults” into the public imagination in a way they hadn’t been prior to. The deconstruction movement made ex-member stories into consumable podcast series. In the 1990s, if you wanted to hear a Mormon de-conversion story, you’d have to fly to Utah. Today, TikTok and YouTube’s recommendation engines have learned that religious controversy drives engagement, so it’s just a matter of scrolling.

There’s also a generational dimension. Millennial Evangelicals and younger aren’t inspired by the “stay away” posture of the counter-cult movement. They’re not naive about heterodoxy—they know theological boundaries matter—but they’re instinctively resistant to Othering. The impulse to stick up for the outsider runs deep in this cohort. The counter-cult’s protective crouch just doesn’t resonate. It feels fearful rather than faithful. I’ve seen this at apologetics seminars: classic counter-cultists doing their thing but not connecting with Gen Z. And the old tactics don’t work anymore. The “expert” says something salacious about a “cult,” and within five seconds the audience is fact-checking with AI on their phones. The old posture and its infrastructure has lost its power, but some of the counter-cult folks haven’t picked up on that yet.

(Side note: in my opinion, the “cult” label itself still carries latent permission to be unserious. Personally, I reserve the term for groups that fit the sociological profile—small, high-control, leader-centered movements like Jonestown or NXIVM—rather than large religious traditions with developed theologies, however much I may disagree with them.)

Then, there’s what I’ll call the Mormon proximity problem. Latter-day Saints aren’t showing up online as fringe figures but as attractive, successful, wholesome content creators, e.g., Mormon mommy influencers, BYU athletes, successful musicians, etc. At the same time, the LDS Church has pivoted away from “Mormonism” by emphasizing Christ-centered language and adopting rhetoric that sounds increasingly evangelical. The old markers of difference are harder to spot.

Granted, the Church’s recent legal action against use of the term “Mormon” complicates this effort. It’s sending mixed messages, and, in my opinion, the Church needs to settle it’s relationship with “Mormon”: either give it up or retain it in some form, but don’t distance from it—especially by assigning a negative moral quality to it—only to then sue people for using the word. It’s super confusing.

Anyway, for Latter-day Saints, this shift represents a sincere effort to emphasize their faith in Christ, but it feels very different for evangelicals. For us, it re-raises questions about where theological boundaries lie. Mormons aren’t distant anymore; now, they’re our algorithmic neighbors.

Naturally, that proximity elicits a response.

But unlike the counter-cult movement—which rallied around recognizable experts—the contra-cult movement has no central authority, no stabilizing reference point, and no go-to texts. Instead, we see a flattened ecosystem: reaction channels analyzing Mormon temple ceremonies, street evangelism videos on YouTube, ex-member testimonies on TikTok, long-form interview podcasts, self-published exposés, etc. Some are theologically informed, others experientially driven. Many are both.

This parallels what Carl Trueman calls ‘Gig Eva,’ which is his term for the gig-economy model of evangelical influence, where entrepreneurial authority replaces institutional gatekeeping. Because the medium rewards personality and visibility, influence depends less on scholarship than on the dynamics of digital attention.

The audience has shifted, too. Counter-cult material was produced for evangelicals to consume privately. Contra-cult content is public-facing and aimed at a dual audience. The posture isn’t “stay away” but “prepare and engage.” The banner verse isn’t 2 John 1:10–11 anymore; it’s closer to 1 Peter 3:15: “Always be prepared to give an answer,” though we might remember that the same verse demands we do so ‘with gentleness and respect.’ (I’ve seen this done very well very recently, but I’m also seeing it done poorly.) Evangelicals aren’t just learning about Mormonism in their church Bible studies anymore. They’re performing—in the best sense of the word—their engagement with it for everyone to see.

Now, I think this democratization brings benefits. I’m especially grateful for the breaking of the ‘expert’ discourse monopoly. Those days are over, and good riddance. Evangelicals can now police their own with much more force.

For example, when Mark Driscoll released a sloppy booklet on Mormonism complete with an AI-hallucinated quote, he got called out publicly and deleted the resource rather than fix it. There’s no hiding behind the print-and-lectern circuit of the 1960s, when audiences assumed your expertise and wanted what you said to be true. Now, however, you get fact-checked in real time.

But that same democratization brings its own risks. Driscoll’s deletion, for example, doesn’t mean the work never happened, or that people who downloaded it stopped circulating it. And for every resource that gets called out, like the hydra serpent, dozens more circulate without scrutiny, because expertise has thinned and accuracy is harder to referee. Social media platforms reward spectacle over substance, and that’s a serious problem.

Again, the “cult” label itself is problematic, in part because it carries latent permission to be unserious. The attitude I sense is something like this: “You don’t really need to have all the facts straight with Mormanism [sic] because it’s so ridiculous: Why take it seriously?” So, even when engagement can be more charitable than it was in the counter-cult era, that framing also excuses laziness. If they’re a cult, the thinking goes, why engage their arguments carefully?

So, I see both promise and danger. The promise is that evangelical engagement can become more informed and humane, even more honest than some counter-cult material of the past. But the danger is that we risk repeating the errors of that earlier movement—e.g., caricature, haste, selective representation—while adding new problems that are made possible only by the social media ‘attention economy.’ And I’m still not comfortable with applying the term “cult” to groups like the LDS Church, although I doubt that’s going to change anytime soon, thus: countra-cult movement.

Anyway, the question is whether the countra-cult movement will become a more thoughtful form of religious engagement or another digital arena where complex traditions are flattened into content. The answer will depend on whether those who participate choose depth, accuracy, and clarity over the platforms’ demand for immediacy.

📘 Coming February 2026: 40 Questions About Mormonism

If you’ve appreciated this essay, you’ll love my forthcoming book, 40 Questions About Mormonism (Kregel Academic). It’s written for traditional Christians who want clear, charitable, and biblically faithful answers to the most common questions about the Latter-day Saint faith and tradition.

PRE-ORDER TODAY and download three free chapters while you wait.

Based on research for a forthcoming book.

I’d always heard Joseph Smith’s grandfather, Asael Smith, described as suspicious of organized religion, “avowedly Christian but basically irreligious.” I accepted this characterization for years, and perhaps you have, too.

So, I raised an eyebrow when I learned that this judgment rests almost entirely on a single, dramatic episode.

That realization sent me down a research trail I’ve only recently returned from, one that forced me to revise my understanding of Joseph Smith’s paternal grandfather.

I don’t think Asael Smith was a “irreligious” Universalist.

Instead, I think Asael Smith is better understood (by today’s terminology) as an Inclusivist with universal hopes, and a very religious one at that.

So, why do people think he was ‘irreligious’? Two primary reasons, I think:

1. Asael apparently liked Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason and was hostile to organized religion.

2. Asael founded a Universalist society in Vermont.

At face value, sure, it looks like Asael was no fan of the Christian orthodoxy. But that’s only because we lack context and we project our contemporary theological definitions onto Asael.

I found that the closer you step toward Asael, the more apparent his inclusivism becomes.

First up, Asael’s infamous Age of Reason episode.

Hurling Reason At Joseph Smith’s Dad

In 1803, Asael visited his son, Joseph Smith Sr., and daughter-in-law, Lucy, after learning they’d started attending Methodist meetings. According to Lucy’s later recollection, her father-in-law reacted with fury. He reportedly stormed into their home, hurled a copy of The Age of Reason toward Joseph Sr., and “angrily bade him to read that until he believed it.”

Admittedly, that looks like Asael was a cage-stage Reddit atheist. From that moment alone, it’s easy to imagine Asael as a disciple of Thomas Paine, hostile to Christianity itself, and eager to replace faith with reason.

That conclusion, however, asks way too much of this single episode, as other evidence shows. As Richard Lloyd Anderson cautioned long ago, there’s little reason to assume Asael embraced Paine wholesale, especially the skeptic’s ridicule of Christ’s atoning work. The incident clearly reveals opposition, but the object of that opposition is what interests me.

What Asael rejected wasn’t Christ, but a form of Christianity that, in his judgment, distorted Christ’s work and burdened the conscience (more on that later). Asael appears to have favored Paine’s appeal to reason as a weapon against clerical coercion, not as a substitute for the gospel. In other words, Asael plundered Egypt: he took Paine’s rational tools but not his theological conclusions.

But what about his Universalism?

The Vermont “Rural Intelligensia”

Asael was raised a Congregationalist (Calvinist) but later became a founding member of an Universalist Society (definitely not Calvinist) in Vermont in the late 1790s, several years before the book-throwing episode.

So, he’s squarely in the Universalist camp, believing all religious roads lead to heaven regardless of the path to get there, right?

Wrong.

Early American Universalism wasn’t like the religiously pluralistic Unitarian Universalism we’re familiar with today. Nor was it a refuge for the religiously indifferent. It attracted women and men who were intensely moral, biblically literate, and theologically engaged, yet deeply suspicious of traditional creeds and church authority. Randolph Roth aptly described Vermont’s Universalists as members of the “rural intelligentsia,” self-taught farmers and artisans whose theological instincts rubbed against the grain of established churches.

Asael fits that description neatly.

His resistance wasn’t to Christianity itself but to institutionalized Christianity. In particular, it was Calvinism’s doctrine of election and Methodism’s insistence on repentance as the necessary escape from eternal conscious torment that appears to have struck him as morally objectionable.

Asael wasn’t “irreligious;” his was an anti-institutional, reason-based Christian piety.

That posture becomes extremely apparent in a letter he later wrote to his children in 1799. In it, he didn’t commend skepticism or moral autonomy. Rather, he urged them repeatedly toward “the scriptures” and “sound reason,” calling these the two “witnesses” God had appointed for learning the gospel, not creeds and clergy.

Within this framework, Asael asked a pressing question: Did salvation consist in “outward forms, rites and ordinances,” or did sinners require help “from any other hand than [their] own,” i.e., a pastor or priest? No. The issue wasn’t whether Christ saves, but how salvation is secured and received.

And this is how Asael understand it: “Sinners must be saved by the rightiousness of Christ alone, without [mixing] any of their own rightiousness with his.”

Amen, Asael.

Now, that might surprise some readers, given Asael’s reputation as an “irreligious” Universalist, but this is why history matters.

Early American Universalism never denied Christ’s uniqueness in redemption; rather, it argued for its widest scope possible—all people everywhere—via the most narrow, exclusive mechanism possible—Christ’s cross alone, e.g., not deism, not Islam, not paganism, etc.

And we see that reflected in Asael’s letter. He didn’t believe there were multiple paths to heaven. He universalized the reach of Christ’s atonement, not the method. Christ’s work was sufficient, complete, and impartial, extending to all rather than restricted to a predestined few. Certainly, no one should be coerced by a preacher into begging God for salvation at a Methodist camp meeting; they need to realize God already has saved them. God showed no partiality whatsoever, which was an Asael held a universalist hope that God “can as well save all as any, and there is no respect of persons with God.” God can save all, said Asael, and “will have all mankind to be saved” (i.e., God desires that all humanity are saved), not through myriad religious paths, but through Christ alone because, according to Asael, “there is one God, and one mediator between God and man” (see 1 Timothy 2:5). Again, neither the gods nor Muhammad are the mediators here: it’s Christ alone.

So, in contemporary theological terms, I think Asael’s position aligns most closely with a sort of ‘universal-hoped Inclusivism,’ i.e., the conviction that salvation is accomplished exclusively through Christ, yet applied by God beyond the boundaries of explicit knowledge or institutional affiliation, so as to include more people than we might suppose, and hopefully all people in the end.

In that sense, Asael stands closer to figures like C. S. Lewis (The Last Battle) or David Bentley Hart (That All Shall Be Saved), both of whom frame salvation within a Christological account—Lewis inclusively and Hart universally. Neither Lewis nor Hart (nor Asael) believe in a sort of diffused, relativistic salvation like the (Unitarian) Universalism we know today, which functions less as a Christian soteriology than as a generalized moral intuition.

I’ll go so far as to say this: Early American Universalists, like Asael, would have regarded contemporary Christ-less Universalism as incoherent nonsense, perhaps even heretical.

Now, just to clarify, I’m not a universalist. I can’t get around Christ’s stark warnings about wide gates that lead to “destruction” (Matthew 7:13), that God can “destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28), that the fruitless are pruned and destroyed (see John 15:6), and that many will hear “I never knew you; depart from me” (Matthew 7:23). This all suggests a definitive, irreversible exclusion from eternal life rather than its universal bestowal. I land where Lewis did: In the end, someone has to say, “Thy will be done,” whether it’s us or God. Eternal death and destruction are real, and if anyone is there, it’s because they chose it.

(This essay isn’t about me, it’s about Asael, but I just wanted to clarify.)

Was Asael Smith Really “Irreligious”?

So, was Asael Smith “avowedly Christian but basically irreligious”? Only if one assumes that distrust of established churches amounts to disbelief in salvation itself. In reality, Asael’s soteriology was centered on the conviction that Christ’s exclusive atonement extended to all humanity. It rested solely on Christ’s completed work but on a mode of atonement—an infinite one—that traditional Christianity didn’t teach him.

This is interesting to me because it presages later Mormon soteriology. Asael’s Universalism may have suppled the Smith family the soteriological ideas and grammar in which later Mormon expansion became not only possible but coherent within its own system. A salvation already extended to all humanity through Christ—his infinite atonement efficient to resurrect all—would require a heavenly cosmos spacious enough to receive it, though fair enough to reward human efforts (or lack thereof).

That’s why D&C 76 doesn’t register as a theological rupture to me. Out of step with traditional Christianity, yes of course, but not unpredictable or incoherent in Mormon thought. Joseph Smith didn’t replace a narrow heaven with a wider one. He organized a heaven already presumed to be wide, because that’s what he grew up with. Degrees of glory distribute the effects of Christ’s atonement rather than diminish them, at least as Joseph understood the matter.

Ok, so, here’s where I land now: Asael Smith wasn’t “irreligious,” but he was convinced that salvation outran orthodox limits, but always and forever ran through Christ.

Asael Smith was’t religious pluralist, which is how we typically understand Universalism. In contemporary terms, Asael was a believing Inclusivist with universalist hopes.

Read Asael Smith’s 1799 letter here.

📘 Coming February 2026: 40 Questions About Mormonism

If you’ve appreciated this essay, you’ll love my forthcoming book, 40 Questions About Mormonism (Kregel Academic). It’s written for traditional Christians who want clear, charitable, and biblically faithful answers to the most common questions about the Latter-day Saint faith and tradition.

PRE-ORDER TODAY and download three free chapters while you wait.

Note: This essay is based on my Christmas Eve homily. While it’s not my usual writing, I thought I’d share anyhow.

My daughter has been getting into I Spy recently.

You know the game.

Someone spots something hidden in plain sight, gives a clue, and the other person has to guess what it is.

Lately, it’s been Christmas-themed: “I spy with my little eye something tall and green with yellow teeth.”

(That’s obviously the nine-foot inflatable Grinch on the McNiven’s front yard.)

My kid loves it, I think, because it rewards curiosity and attention. If I’m honest, I love it, too, because it suggests the world still has meaning tucked inside it, waiting to be found.

I’m glad the Bible tells us this instinct isn’t childish at all.

“It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out.” (Proverbs 25:2)

God delights to hide truth, but not to keep it from us. He wants us “search things out,” to look again, carefully this time. Which makes the Nativity of the Gospel accounts something like a holy game of I Spy. If you look closely, you’ll notice how God placed clues everywhere, little signs that interpret themselves once we know what to look for.

Jesus gave us those clues.

He told us who He is and why He came, especially in His “I am” statements found in the Gospel of John. And when you stare long enough at the Nativity, you begin to see them.

I Spy Something Bright

Jesus said,

“I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12).

Where’s that light in the Nativity?

It shines overhead.

The star pierces the night sky, visible from far away, drawing strangers to worship a child they never met. “For we saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him” (Matthew 2:2), said the magi.

No offense to all the amateur astronomers trying to prove this was an actual event—I think it was—but that’s beside the point.

The point is the world Jesus entered: a dark world.

Darkness in the Bible is less a statement about the absence of daylight than it is the presence of something wrong, something broken, something menacing. Darkness means sin, confusion, fear, estrangement from God, death.

It’s into that darkness God sent His only Son.

“For God loved the world in this way: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.” John 3:16, CSB

Granted, the light doesn’t erase the darkness instantly—there’s still sin and suffering in the world—but it gives direction, making movement “out of darkness into his marvelous light” possible (see 1 Peter 2:9). Remember, God’s Son came not to condemn the world, but to redeem it (see John 3:17). “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10).

Light means we’re no longer lost.

I Spy Something Standing Watch

Jesus said,

“I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (John 10:11).

Where are the shepherds in the Nativity?

This one’s easy.

In the Nativity story, shepherds are everywhere. They’re awake while others sleep, watching their flocks in the open fields at night (see Luke 2:8).

Why shepherds? Because of the cost they pay to protect their flocks. They know the risks, that sheep wander and can’t defend themselves from predators. So, it’s bad news when they wander from shepherd care.

It’s doubly bad news to know that, “All we like sheep have gone astray” (Isaiah 53:6).

The world Jesus enters, then, wasn’t just dark; it was dangerous, filled with deception, temptation, and evil that seeks to abuse and oppress and kill (see 1 Peter 5:8).

It still is.

The presence of shepherds at Jesus’s birth signals that this child has come to stand between danger and the vulnerable, between Satan and sinner. He doesn’t flee when the cost becomes clear—His own death on a cross.

He gives himself.

I Spy Something to Eat

(This one is my favorite.)

Jesus said, “I am the bread of life,” and then pressed the claim further:

“I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh” (John 6:48, 51).

“Wait… Where is bread in the Nativity?” you wonder.

It’s right there in the center of the scene: the manger.

Think about it. We’ve tamed the Nativity too much. To us, the manger is basically a makeshift crib, safe and cute.

But let’s be real: a manger is a feeding trough.

The word “manger” comes from the Latin mandere, which means “to chew.” It’s the same root word where the English “mandible” comes from (jawbone).

Sure, it was a makeshift crib, but toss the pragmatism aside for a moment, you kings, to ‘search out’ what God has ‘concealed’ here: God placed the Bread of Life in a feeding trough to show that salvation would come by consuming.

From the very beginning of Christ’s life, He was placed where food belongs, to be consumed by the creatures He created (see Colossians 1:16–17).

Bread is broken, shared, received. Jesus didn’t arrive merely to be observed or admired or even followed. He came to be given for the life of the world.

Receive Him by faith.

Merry Christmas, friends.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has recently clarified its position on the use of English Bible translations other than its preferred version, the King James Bible.

The updated General Handbook reiterates that members should “generally” use Church-published editions of the Bible in classes and meetings. For English speakers, then, that means the KJV is still preferred. And this preference remains for practical and doctrinal reasons, e.g., there’s something instinctively familiar to a Latter-day Saint about saying the “Holy Ghost” rather than the “Holy Spirit.”

But here’s the shift that was recently made. The handbook now states:

“Other Bible translations may also be used. Some individuals may benefit from translations that are doctrinally clear and also easier to understand.”

That clarification is interesting because it explicitly applies to Church classes and meetings, not just private study. In other words, consulting other English translations is now publicly acknowledged as legitimate, and sometimes even beneficial within official LDS Church settings.

The KJV, of course, remains the common baseline for the LDS Church, but it’s no longer the only permissible version of the Bible.

And that’s what caught my attention.

Why?

Because, as beautiful and historically formative as King James English is, language changes. It grows and evolves over time. So, for modern readers, the King James Bible often introduces a secondary layer of interpretation. The biblical text is translated from Hebrew and Greek into seventeenth-century English, and only then into the modern English of our minds. That additional step can obscure meaning rather than clarify it.

Contemporary English translations attempt to remove that soft interpretive filter by translating directly into living English. They don’t eliminate interpretation, because no translation can. But they do reduce the distance between the ancient text and the modern reader.

Here are some of my thoughts on this change.

#1 - A Pastoral Response

First, and most importantly, this is interesting to me from a pastoral perspective.

I’m genuinely glad for Latter-day Saints. I love the Bible, and as a teaching pastor, I spend most of my waking hours studying and teaching it, so I can try to help others understand its message. And, more often than not, it says things I don’t want to hear, things that push and challenge me. It’s like a mirror reflecting my soul, and sometimes I don’t like what I see.

That’s because the Bible confronts us. It breaks through our pride and self-deception (see Jeremiah 23:29). Sometimes it exposes what we’d rather keep hidden, the dark stuff we excuse for ourselves but hold others to. But it’s also a lamp, lighting just enough of life’s path before us to allow us to take the next step (see Psalm 119:105). And, when we’re worn thin, it reminds us to simply ask God to comfort us by his word (see Psalm 119:28).

Why does the Bible do that?

This is because the Bible is breathed out by God and bears the mark of his Holy Spirit who inspired it (see 2 Timothy 3:16). Even in its hardest passages, I find correction and encouragement, and again and again, the fingerprints of the Lord Jesus himself, e.g., He is the ark to hide in, the lamb slain, the rock struck, the better king, the suffering servant. The Bible is ordered around him. He’s the Word of God, the one through whom God speaks and acts, the one who makes God known to us (see John 1:1–3).

For that reason alone, I’m glad when unnecessary barriers to understanding are removed, even when those barriers are beautiful and long-cherished as the KJV language is for many.

#2 - More Permission Than Prescription

This change is less direction than it is permission, perhaps even reassurance.

Many Latter-day Saints have long consulted other English translations in private study, especially younger members and teachers who are drawn to modern renditions because they find the KJV’s English to be an obstacle for understanding, as beautiful and sacred as the prose may sound.

So, with this policy change, the LDS Church has said plainly that clarity in reading the Bible is a legitimate goal.

In fact, the update went further still by listing specific recommended English translations. Without formally endorsing them, the handbook names several as helpful options:

• English Standard Version (ESV)

• New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

• New International Version (NIV)

• New Living Translation (NLT)

• New King James Version (NKJV)

• And for children, the New International Reader’s Version (NIrV)

So, that feels less like bare permission and more like invitation.

#3 - The Eighth Article of Faith Remains In Tact

I saw some reactions to this change quickly rally around the LDS Church’s 8th Article of Faith, which states: “We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly.”

If multiple English translations are now allowed, then, does this policy change amount to an admission that they are “translated correctly” to the LDS Church’s standard?

No, and obviously not.

The handbook’s recommendations come with a clear qualifier, that only “editions of the Bible that align well with the Lord’s doctrine in the Book of Mormon and modern revelation (see Articles of Faith 1:8)” should be used. They literally point members to the 8th.

So, nothing about the 8th Article has been abandoned.

What has changed is how the 8th functions practically. Rather than serving as a blanket suspicion of modern translations, it now acts like a measuring stick for Latter-day Saints. Some translations are more clear than others, but that’s only made clear itself when a person is encouraged to compare translations.

#4 - Addressing Other Reactions

Some evangelicals worry that accessible English Bibles blur the line between Mormonism and traditional Christianity, but I’m wary of that concern. Its practical implication is that Latter-day Saints should not read the Bible clearly lest they sound “too Christian.”

Interestingly, that instinct isn’t new. Just recently, I stumbled across an example. In 1884, an evangelical missionary in Calcutta complained that LDS missionaries confused locals because they “use the current language of evangelical Christians very glibly” (Christian Cynosure, December 18, 1884). The problem back then, as now, wasn’t the Bible per se. It was a similar concern resting on very different assumptions about canon, authority, and how the Bible functions in the life of the LDS Church. If the solution is to prevent Mormons from reading “our” translations rather than clarifying the differences with them and others, then that response misses the point.

On the LDS side, I’ve heard the concern—sometimes half-joking—that this removes a bit of Mormon “weirdness,” i.e., they enjoy the odd uniqueness of retaining the King James Bible over modern translations. But I don’t think the handbook change does anything to the peculiarity of Mormonism. Let’s be honest: there are no shortage of LDS distinctives left, e.g., embodied God, proxy baptism, Heavenly Mother. There are plenty of options to choose from. A readable Bible doesn’t magically erase uniquely LDS claims.

Also, encouraging modern English translations isn’t a gateway to evangelicalism. Besides, the Bible is half of the LDS canon. Why wouldn’t you want to read it rendered in language that can be readily understood?

#5 A Short Guide to the Recommended Translations

So, if you’re a Latter-day Saint wondering, “Which one should I read?” here’s my take.

First, none of the translations listed are perfect, nor can they ever be. No English Bible today is a flawless translation of the original texts, partly because we don’t have the original manuscripts themselves—though we can have a very high degree of confidence in their faithful transmission—but also because translation is an artform as much of it is a science, so it relies on translator judgment. Moving meaning from Hebrew and Greek into English requires choices about vocabulary, syntax, idiom, emphasis, etc. Those choices are unavoidable.

That means every translation, including the KJV, reflects things like interpretive decisions and theological commitments and practical priorities. There’s always going to be interpretation decisions, so the real question is whether those judgments are made carefully, with the ultimate goal of being faithful to what the text actually says.

In my opinion, the LDS Church has wisely recommended English translations that each reflect earnest translation judgements, who all share the same concern for both textual seriousness and readability.

On the more formal end are the NRSV and ESV, and both come from the KJV tradition, so they will feel most familiar to Latter-day Saints. Of the two, I think the NRSV will feel most natural.

The NLT represents a more dynamic approach, prioritizing meaning in clear, contemporary English. It’s great for readers who struggle with dense prose, or who want the Bible to read smoothly without constantly having to think about the text itself.

The NIV sits comfortably between those approaches, and often works well for sustained reading and family study. This is the version I grew up with.

One of my favorites, the Christian Standard Bible (see above for John 2:19–3:18a), didn’t make the list, but I think it’s the best combination of a word-for-word and thought-for-thought translation. Highly recommended.

#6 - A Small Word of Advice

Don’t turn Bible translations into tribal markers. This is among the least helpful things I see—and endure—as an evangelical pastor. Bible translations aren’t sports teams to whom you pledge lifelong allegiance and boo the rest from the stands. There aren’t really “good” vs. “bad” translations; rather, there are more or less reliable translations.

In my experience, people with the strongest opinions about why this translation is the best and why that translation is the worst often lack basic familiarity with how translation works, or are fixated on a single disputed issue that has become a personal hobby horse, or just parrot their pastor’s or professor’s opinion, or were convinced by a meme online.

Don’t get caught up in that nonsense unless you plan to specialize in biblical linguistics and translation theory. That work matters, of course, so someone has to do it. But for most of us—the overwhelming majority, in fact—there’s no obligation to contribute to the noise and to repeat half-understood arguments. Just find a quality translation that you understand, and roll with it.

Imagine Bible translations as players on the same sports team, each occupying a different position. The goal is the same—to ‘win’ by conveying meaning faithfully—but their strengths (‘positions on the field’) differ. One may excel at close textual work, another at clarity, another at narrative flow. When they ‘play’ together, they work toward the same goal, i.e., understanding God’s word rather than competing for loyalty. “I follow Crossway.” “I follow Zondervan.” “I follow James I!”

Paul would like a word.

#7 - Getting Practical

To see why it’s important to compare multiple English translations, let’s consider a single, very familiar, verse.

James 1:5. It’s short, frequently quoted, super popular in the LDS world, and often memorized in the King James Version. Comparing how different translations handle it reveals what is gained—not lost—when clarity is allowed to do its work.

Jeff McCullough recently walked through this exercise on Hello Saints!, and it’s a good illustration of the basic method. We’re not trying to crown a winner here. Remember, they’re all on the same ‘team’ with the same ‘goal,’ i.e., understanding the word of God.

The King James Version reads:

“If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.”

For readers raised on the KJV, this sounds super familiar, even reassuring. For many modern readers, however, several phrases create friction.

“Lack wisdom” expresses absence, but not necessarily desire. I lack a thousand-dollar repair bill for a busted transmission, though I certainly don’t want one. James assumes that wisdom is a good to be desired, something the reader longs for, but that assumption isn’t explicit in contemporary English.

“All men liberally” poses a couple different problems. In modern usage, liberal usually signals political or social categories, not generosity. The older sense, “abundantly,” survives only as a secondary meaning. And also, the phrase “all men” can sound a bit restrictive. Does God not give wisdom to women or children?

“Upbraideth not” is the steepest hurdle for a modern reader. Be honest. You don’t know what that means instinctively. Most people either have to look it up or guess by context. That’s a shame, because there’s a beautiful promise embedded in this verse here, i.e., that God doesn’t scold, shame, or reproach the asked. But it’s obfuscated by Jacobean vocabulary.

Now consider the New International Version:

“If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you.”

Now, we can intuit better the spirit behind this verse.

“Gives generously to all” captures the idea behind the Greek pasin, which means simply “to all,” without narrowing the scope to men—in fact, the word for “men” isn’t even present in the Greek text to begin with. So, of course, women and children are also invited to pray for wisdom.

“Without finding fault” melts away shame. God doesn’t blame you for your lack of wisdom. (Read that again; it’s important.) James 1:5 doesn’t tell you to come God sheepishly, hat-in-hand, to ask for wisdom because you’re too dumb to understand something. No! You just can’t see how the pieces fit together from your vantage point, but God can. So, you turned to God rather than the world for wisdom. Well done! That posture is commended, not corrected.

The New Living Translation presses this even further:

“If you need wisdom, ask our generous God, and he will give it to you. He will not rebuke you for asking.”

Notice the shift from “lack” to “need.” Wisdom is no longer framed as a mere absence; rather, it’s a good the reader actively seeks. The translators also describe God as “generous.” Granted, that adjective doesn’t appear explicitly in the Greek, but the interpretation is appropriate because a God who gives generously is, by implication, a generous God. The translation applies God’s action to God’s character, remaining well within the author’s likely intent.

Most striking is the final line: “He will not rebuke you for asking.” I love this because the NLT makes it unmistakable that God isn’t irritated by your request. He doesn’t sigh and roll his eyes and remind you that you should’ve known better by now. Asking for wisdom is not a moral failure; it’s an act of humble dependence.

With the KJV, NIV, and NLT side-by-side, James 1:5 takes on a more textured, meaningful form, doesn’t it?

Alright, that’s enough from me. If you’d like, I can revise this essay in Jacobean English to compare. ; )

📘 Coming February 2026: 40 Questions About Mormonism

If you’ve appreciated this essay, you’ll love my forthcoming book, 40 Questions About Mormonism (Kregel Academic). It’s written for traditional Christians who want clear, charitable, and biblically faithful answers to the most common questions about the Latter-day Saint faith and tradition.

PRE-ORDER TODAY and download three free chapters while you wait.

I’ve been digging into the world surrounding Joseph Smith’s birth in 1805, trying to understand the worldview, pressures, and anticipations of early-republic New England. This is not an area of expertise for me, so it’s a bit overwhelming. But the more I’ve learned, the more I’m convinced I underestimated just how strange and accelerated that era really was.

Here are five things I learned that helped me feel the texture of Joseph’s world a little more clearly.

Hopefully, they help you, too.

1. The distance between Joseph Smith and the American Revolution isn’t as long as it seems.

Joseph was born just two decades after the Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War. For perspective, that’s roughly the same distance between 9/11 and the Covid-19 pandemic. That’s how immediate the nation’s founding struggles still felt. Veterans were still talking about the war during Joseph’s childhood, being closer to the American Revolution than we are to Desert Storm. In fact, Joseph’s grandfathers—Solomon Mack and Asael Smith—both fought in the war, and possibly relayed their experiences to him (Solomon wrote about it in his memoir).

2. The month before Joseph Smith was born, Lewis and Clark reached the Pacific Ocean.

In November 1805, after a grueling, continent-spanning journey through newly purchased territory, the Corps of Discovery stood at the western edge of lands the United States had claimed only two years earlier through the Louisiana Purchase. Their survival and success depended heavily on Indigenous guidance, most famously that of Sacagawea, whose knowledge of terrain, languages, and diplomacy proved to be indispensable. Joseph arrived a few weeks later into a nation just beginning to grasp the scale of what it had acquired. America had touched its western horizon, but it barely understood what that horizon meant.

3. Joseph Smith was born the same month as one of Napoleon’s most consequential victories, heightening a climate already charged with eschatological anxiety.

He entered the world in December 1805, the same month as the Battle of Austerlitz, when Napoleon crushed the combined Russian and Austrian forces and dramatically reordered the map of Europe. Americans followed these sorts of conflicts closely, not only because of their political and economic implications, but also through a distinctly apocalyptic imagination shaped by biblical language about “wars and rumors of wars.” European upheaval registered in American religious thought as a possible signal that history itself was nearing its close, heightening millenarian anticipation.

4. When Joseph was two, Vermont became the first New England state to end religious taxation.

In 1807, the state abolished its ministerial tax, severing one of the last formal ties between church and public funding in the region and making religious support entirely voluntary. This marked a decisive shift away from inherited parish Christianity to a more persuasion-based form. Without state backing, clergy had to compete for members and resources. And as the frontier expanded westward, denominations scrambled to establish presence in new settlements, often clashing over theological differences that had previously been contained within colonial borders. No wonder Joseph would later report on the cacophony of denominationalism; it was practically structural at that point. Throw on top of it all the Second Great Awakening, and later, Joseph living in the “Burned-Over District” to boot.

5. One of the most iconic ships in American history was already out policing the Mediterranean.

By the time Joseph was born, the USS Constitution, later nicknamed “Old Ironsides,” had defeated Barbary corsairs, and helped bring the First Barbary War (1801–1805) to a close. The ship came to symbolize something about the young nation, that America’s independence was not just something they declared, but it was something they now defended.

Fun fact: you can still visit that same ship today in Boston.

Ok, so, what’s the takeaway?

For me, it’s a greater understanding of the world in which Joseph Smith was born and raised. It was one in constant motion, seeking stability but struggling to find it. Nothing about it was stable, not really. Politics, faith, commerce, and imagination were being all renegotiated all at once.

No wonder he became convinced that God would intervene in history.

📘 Coming February 2026: 40 Questions About Mormonism

If you’ve appreciated this essay, you’ll love my forthcoming book, 40 Questions About Mormonism (Kregel Academic). It’s written for traditional Christians who want clear, charitable, and biblically faithful answers to the most common questions about the Latter-day Saint faith and tradition.

PRE-ORDER TODAY and download three free chapters while you wait.

If you ask a Latter-day Saint (or “Mormon”) where the decisive act of redemption occurred, many will point not to the cross but to the Garden of Gethsemane. And that isn’t anecdotal. A Brigham Young University study asked students where “the Atonement of Christ mostly took place.” Eighty-eight percent answered, “In the Garden of Gethsemane.” Only twelve percent chose “On the Cross at Calvary.”1

I think those numbers reveal one of the most distinctive features of modern LDS soteriology. The garden carries an enormous theological weight that, for many, defines where Christ bore human sin. Yet, interestingly, this emphasis isn’t native to early Mormon thought, nor does it stand in easy relation to the scriptural foundations of Christian atonement—whether biblical or LDS—so recent efforts among Latter-day Saints to recover the cross stand out as a notable and welcome development.

This was the topic of a presentation I delivered in Boston at the Evangelical Theological Society annual meeting last week, titled Horticentric Atonement in Mormon Soteriology: Its Rise, Theological Tensions, and Reorientation.

Here’s the Reader’s Digest version.

The Seeds of Horticentric Atonement

First, a term you may not know: horticentrism. I use it to describe a garden-centered view of Christ’s atonement, from the Latin hortus, meaning garden, and set over against crucicentrism, a cross-centered view.

I define horticentrism as the Latter-day Saint pattern of locating Christ’s decisive, sin-bearing work primarily in the Garden of Gethsemane rather than in His death on the cross.

To see how that emphasis arose, we need to start at the beginning of the Mormon story. The earliest LDS scriptures and sermons resembled broader nineteenth-century Protestant crucicentrism. The 1830 Articles and Covenants (now Doctrine and Covenants 20) confess that Christ “was crucified, died, and rose again the third day.” Joseph Smith exhorted his followers to “preach Christ, and Him crucified” (cf. 1 Corinthians 2:2). In fact, he referred to Gethsemane in connection with atonement only once, as far as I can find, and that connection remains fairly weak.

But other texts within the LDS scriptural tradition created room for a garden-oriented reading. Mosiah 3:7 describes Christ’s suffering in language that resembles Luke’s Gospel: “blood cometh from every pore, so great shall be his anguish.” Doctrine and Covenants 19:18 intensifies the imagery, quoting Christ as saying that He began “to tremble because of pain, and to bleed at every pore.” These passages don’t articulate a full horticentric theology, but they supply raw material that later Latter-day Saints would elevate into a theological centerpiece.

Both of these unique LDS verses intuitively resemble Luke 22:44, in which Christ is described as being in such agony that “his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground.”

While Joseph couldn’t have known at the time that the earliest and more reliable manuscripts don’t include this verse, he was likely aware of the debate over whether the blood was literal (hematidrosis) or metaphorical.2 Commentators like Adam Clarke—whom Joseph consulted—sided with a figurative reading because the key Greek phrase for “like” (hōsei) marks comparison, not composition. Luke’s Gospel used it the same way elsewhere, describing likeness rather than identity (see 3:23; 9:14).

Joseph, though, preserved the verse as it stood in his New Testament revision and apparently favored a literal interpretation. Whether he understood the textual issues behind it or simply followed the KJV’s rendering, the result was the same: the reading became scripturally authoritative in the LDS tradition, even though early LDS teachings continued to center Calvary.

That balance shifted gradually. Brigham Young, in 1856, suggested the garden’s suffering surpassed the cross because “the Father withdrew Himself . . . and cast a vail over him.”3 John Taylor, in 1892, described Gethsemane as the moment when Christ first bore “the burden of the sins of all men.”4

Still, these leaders treated the garden and the cross as sequential scenes, not rivals. Gethsemane marked the beginning of Christ’s burden as Calvary remained essential.

The Twentieth-Century Turn

A decisive shift came in the early twentieth century. In 1915, James E. Talmage published Jesus the Christ, giving enduring shape to modern LDS atonement theology. He wrote that Christ’s agony in Gethsemane “caused Him to suffer such torture as to produce an extrusion of blood from every pore,” and that in the garden Christ “took upon Himself the burden of the sins of mankind.”5 Talmage didn’t deny the significance of the Crucifixion, but his framing placed Gethsemane at the center of the redemptive act.

This development coincided with a period of institutional redefinition. After the 1890 Manifesto ended polygamy, the Church began integrating into American civic life while emphasizing distinctive theological marks. The horticentric emphasis served that dual function. It helped the Church integrate by centering redemption in Christ in ways recognizable to Christian neighbors, and it reinforced uniqueness by locating Christ’s decisive suffering in Gethsemane rather than on the hill—an interpretation that distinguished the community while preserving its confession of Christ as the sole source of salvation.

By mid-century, the garden had become the dominant venue in LDS preaching. In 1947, President Joseph Fielding Smith taught that Christ’s greatest suffering was not on the cross at all, but in Gethsemane, where “he carried on his back the burden of the sins of the whole world.”6 And in 1985, Bruce R. McConkie delivered the clearest articulation of the mature horticentric model. He declared that Gethsemane was where the “Sinless Son of the Everlasting Father took upon himself the sins of all men.”7 Calvary, in his view, completed the sacrifice, but the redemptive work began in the garden.

This cultural shift gradually reached every corner of LDS devotional life. Art, manuals, curriculum, and hymnody consistently foregrounded Gethsemane. Depictions of the Crucifixion grew sparse—some saying the image feels “too graphic or painful to look at”—and the garden became the imaginative home of the atonement for most Latter-day Saints.8

For example, Melanie M. Hoffman’s 2007 hymn “Gethsemane” captures this well.

     “The hardest thing that ever was done,
          the greatest pain that ever was known,
               the biggest battle that ever was won!
Gethsemane!
     Jesus loves me,
          so he gave this gift to me in Gethsemane.”

Hoffman’s hymn reflects the sensibility that shaped late-twentieth-century LDS piety, that Gethsemane as the decisive arena where Christ’s suffering reached its fullest measure. For many Latter-day Saints raised on these images and songs, the garden was not simply part of the Passion—it was the Passion’s center.

Evangelical Reflection on Horticentrism

From an evangelical perspective, this emphasis creates several theological tensions, especially when measured against the scriptural logic of atonement.

To begin, LDS theology often uses the word “atonement” to encompass the entire sweep of Christ’s mission, i.e., premortal, mortal, and post-resurrection. LDS theologian Grant Underwood notes how contemporary LDS uses of the term “broadly refer[s] to all aspects of Christ’s redemptive work,” not only His sacrificial death.9 This holistic framing explains why Gethsemane plays such a prominent role. It becomes one decisive moment among many, each tied to Christ’s obedience.

Another dynamic helps explain why Gethsemane rises to the surface of LDS devotion. Mormonism’s worldview turns on agency, i.e., the moral freedom that structures the entire Plan of Salvation. In that plan, every human spirit exercised its agency in a premortal council, and Christ voluntarily accepted the role of Savior. Salvation is, therefore, not merely received but pre-chosen. Within that framework, Gethsemane becomes the moment in which Christ’s agency reaches its fullest expression. As Douglas Davies observes, it is the scene where Christ is “proactive in atonement,” enacting the choice He made in the heavenly council long before His mortal life. Latter-day Saints read the garden as the place where He willingly enters a “mystical atonement,” suffering “in both body and spirit” (see Doctrine and Covenants 19:18).10

In this sense, Gethsemane becomes a distinctly LDS expression of the Christus Exemplar motif. Christ not only fulfills His premortal covenant with the Father but also models how human beings, who once affirmed the same plan, are to use their agency: to submit, to obey, and to remain faithful even under the weight of suffering. The garden becomes both the proof of His fidelity and the pattern for theirs.

Evangelical theology distinguishes Christ’s obedient life from His atoning death. Atonement for us is, generally, the once-for-all event in which the obedient Son offered His sacrificial death on the cross, which expiates sin (i.e., wipes away or removes the offense itself) and propitiates God’s wrath (i.e, turns aside the righteous displeasure of the offended moral agent), thereby securing reconciliation between God and sinners. So, the redemptive act itself is singular, rooted in the giving of His life. Suffering prepares that act; obedience expresses it; death accomplishes it.

This is because the Old Testament system that Christ fulfills requires death for atonement. Leviticus 17:11 states that “the life of the flesh is in the blood,” and that “it is the blood that makes atonement by the life.” Bloodshed apart from death doesn’t expiate. Indeed, according to the New Testament, absent death, suffering cannot expiate; and what does not expiate cannot propitiate. Hebrews 9:22 reiterates the point that without the shedding of blood to death (i.e., in the context of sacrifice), “there is no forgiveness of sins.” Redemption comes through the “sacrifice of himself” (Hebrews 9:26). Paul affirms that “we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son” (Romans 5), and summarizes the gospel as simply “Christ died for our sins” (1 Corinthians 15:3). The epistle to the Hebrews centers the atonement in the “offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (10:10). The focus remains consistent: salvation flows from the cross.

Christ Himself pointed toward His death. In John 3:14, He likened His lifting-up to the serpent raised in the wilderness. In Mark 10:45, He spoke of giving His life “as a ransom for many.” His agony in the garden revealed the weight of what He would face, but His death on Golgotha accomplished what Gethsemane prepared. John Calvin captured the distinction well. Christ endured “a fiercer and more arduous struggle than with ordinary death,” yet the struggle anticipated (and actualized) the act that would purge sin.11 In short, the garden disclosed Christ obedience, but the cross executed it.

So, the question isn’t whether Gethsemane matters. It does, of course, but what does it mean? And what is its relation to the cross?

A Slow Reorientation Toward Calvary

In recent years, some Latter-day Saint scholars have encouraged a renewed emphasis on Calvary that complements, rather than replaces, Gethsemane. John Hilton III’s work is especially important.12 By surveying scripture, sermons, curriculum, and art, he shows that the tradition’s earliest sources—both LDS and biblical—lean heavily toward the cross. The horticentric turn arose much later, shaped by cultural, institutional, and theological forces unique to the twentieth century.

Hilton’s work invites Latter-day Saints to recover something earlier generations within their own tradition emphasized—Christ crucified. Not in place of the garden, but alongside it.

This shift appears in LDS hymnody as well. Devan Jensen’s “Long Ago, Within a Garden” (2018) sings of Christ “praying in Gethsemane” and “crucified on Calvary,” uniting both scenes in a single redemptive arc.

Even LDS poetry is taking up the theme. A recent example by Theric Jepson anchors salvation in Christ’s body, his hands.13 (I love this poem, by the way.)

   “The black hole
     of god’s salvation
     is here
                    in his palm
     where else
                         really
                              could It be”

Amen! Where else, indeed!

Alongside these scholarly and artistic developments, I’ve noticed a similar movement in lived religion. After more than a decade of leading interfaith dialogue with evangelical students in Utah, I now meet more and more Latter-day Saint Gen Z wearing cross necklaces. Sure, it’s quiet, uncoordinated, and personal, but it signals (to me at least) an expanding comfort with the symbol that earlier generations avoided.

In sum, I don’t think these developments erase the garden; rather, they give it its proper place. Gethsemane reveals the depth of Christ’s obedience, of course, but Golgotha reveals the cost. One shows the resolve and the other, the ransom (see Mark 10:45).

What Latter-day Saints and Evangelicals Can Learn From Each Other

To be perfectly clear, my aim here isn’t polemical. Latter-day Saints aren’t wrong to revere Gethsemane. They’ve inherited a long theological tradition that elevated the garden for reasons bound to their own history. But in doing so, some modern LDS voices turned the volume so high that Calvary faded from the soundscape, even though their scriptures call them to the cross again and again.

I think evangelicals could learn from this history. Our crucicentrism can sometimes eclipse the profound significance of Christ’s struggle in Gethsemane, e.g., His submission, anguish, and fidelity under the weight of accomplishing atonement. It’s not that we don’t see it, but like our de facto low Mariology when compared to Roman Catholicism, have we inadvertently quieted its place in our devotion? Latter-day Saints have preserved that reverence with real devotion. There’s something there, and we’d do well to see it.

But the center remains where the Gospels place it, i.e., the atonement was accomplished in Christ’s death on Calvary. The garden and the hill stand together when the story is read in its fullness, but they are not equal in role. The obedience of Gethsemane moves toward its goal while the sacrifice of Golgotha secures redemption. After all, the cross—not the garden—is where Christ declared “It is finished,” and that’s the only place where Christian hope begins.

This is why the growing Latter-day Saint recovery of the cross is so encouraging. It isn’t a departure from their tradition but a return to earlier lines in their own history where the crucifixion carried far greater prominence. And evangelicals who give fuller attention to Gethsemane gain a richer sense of the costly obedience that led Christ to that death. Each community notices something the other has tended to overlook.

Brought into conversation, those strengths sharpen the view that the Son who submitted in the garden is also the Son who suffered for sinners, the Son who died on the cross, and the Son who rose in triumph.

📘 Coming February 2026: 40 Questions About Mormonism

If you’ve appreciated this essay, you’ll love my forthcoming book, 40 Questions About Mormonism (Kregel Academic). It’s written for traditional Christians who want clear, charitable, and biblically faithful answers to the most common questions about the Latter-day Saint faith and tradition.

Download three free chapters.

This essay is short and a bit quirky, but I’m in the home stretch of finalizing my presentation of the Gethsemane emphasis in LDS soteriology for my presentation at the upcoming Evangelical Theological Society meeting in Boston. I’ll post the Reader’s Digest version of that paper in the coming weeks. For now, enjoy one of the rabbit holes I went down when I should have been writing on other things…

Ok.

So, how do we actually know we’re pronouncing Book of Mormon names correctly? I mean, of course, besides consulting the LDS Church’s pronunciation guide or assuming ancient Semitic origins and working our way out from there.

I’m asking something more specific. If Joseph Smith or his earliest followers showed up at an LDS sacrament meeting today, would they recognize the way Latter-day Saints say Lehi or Nephi or Moroni?

The thought occurred to me recently while listening to a counter-cult “specialist” lecture on Mormonism.

It wasn’t… great.

The speaker postured himself as an expert, but clearly, he wasn’t. He claimed he was ex-Mo and close to “higher ups,” and maybe he was, but boy it just didn’t seem like it to me.

One of the giveaways was how he pronounced Moroni’s name. He didn’t say the standard muh-ROW-nai, but said it with an Italian flourish: muh-ROW-nee.

At first, I rolled my eyes and closed the tab. But then I started thinking. He was certainly wrong, but what if—by some broken-clock accident—he was wrongly right?

How did the original Latter-day Saint pronounce Book of Mormon names?

Let’s Ask John Walker

Fortunately, we have a resource from Joseph Smith’s own language world, a guide meant to standardize how English speakers pronounced words, including biblical names.

Years before the Book of Mormon appeared in print, John Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary was circulating in America. It was originally published in 1791 (I think) in London, but an American edition (Vermont) was printed in 1824, and another in 1830 (New York).

It’s a fascinating read because Walker’s work belonged to an era before British speech “classed up” with its later Francophilic refinements. In both Britain and America, pronunciation still carried the crisp consonants of pre-Victorian English, not the softened forms that would later make “British” sound like Bri’ish and “little” like li’ul. (For a people who like tea so much, it’s strange to me that they don’t pronounce the t.)

Walker’s goal was to provide a reliable, standardized guide for pronouncing English words. Conveniently, the dictionary ends with a section devoted to the proper names of the Bible.

You can read it here.

Now, whether or not people strictly followed Walker’s prescriptions is less important than what his guide reveals. His book shows how educated English speakers of Joseph Smith’s generation were expected to pronounce biblical names, giving us a basic linguistic baseline for how Joseph and his contemporaries likely said names such as Lehi, Nephi, and Moroni.

Walker provides the phonetic framework of what “sounded right” to an early-nineteenth-century ear. Names ending in -i, -iah, or -el would have followed an established convention. When compared side-by-side with modern usage (e.g., Adonai, Jeremiah, Daniel), those conventions remain remarkably consistent.

This matters because some Book of Mormon names match biblical names directly or contain recognizable biblical components. And when Walker’s biblical pronunciations are compared with those in the modern LDS pronunciation guide, the alignment is striking, especially when the Bible and the Book of Mormon share names.

This suggests early Latter-day Saints inherited, rather than invented, their pronunciation system for the Book of Mormon. They read scripture aloud in the cadence of King James English, absorbing pronunciation through sermons and public reading. So, when new names appeared, especially those shaped with familiar biblical endings, they naturally mapped them onto the sound system they already knew.

What About Moroni?

Here’s the rub, though: Moroni doesn’t appear in the Bible, which means there isn’t a direct biblical equivalent to cross-reference. But its form isn’t unusual if you’re familiar with Walker’s guide. Names ending in -i are consistently treated with the long ī sound.

Lehi? Long ī.

Nephi? Yes, again, long ī.

Amaleki? Long ī, once again.

See the pattern? Biblical names like Levi, Eli, and even “Ai” receive the same treatment.

Within that world, a final -nee sound simply doesn’t fit the established pattern.

So, when the earliest Latter-day Saints encountered “Moroni,” the most natural, instinctive choice would have been to apply the familiar rule: long ī at the end.

And since modern LDS pronunciation preserves that long ī sound—muh-ROW-nai—it is, I believe, closer to how the first readers and hearers would have pronounced it.

In other words, the contemporary pronunciation follows that old pattern, i.e., we’re saying it right. Moroni would have been pronounced the same way we say it today, with with the long ī sound, not -nee.

So, no, the earliest Latter-day Saints were almost certainly not saying muh-ROW-nee. (Sorry, counter-cult guy.)

Alright, what began as an eye-roll at a YouTube lecture turned into a small linguistic archaeology dig, but, hey, I think it was worth the spade and dirt.

Hope you enjoyed it.

📘 Coming February 2026: 40 Questions About Mormonism

If you’ve appreciated this essay, you’ll love my forthcoming book, 40 Questions About Mormonism (Kregel Academic). It’s written for traditional Christians who want clear, charitable, and biblically faithful answers to the most common questions about the Latter-day Saint faith and tradition.

A decade ago, theologian Carl Trueman coined the term “Big Eva” to describe the rise of celebrity pastors and massive conference platforms that quietly displaced local churches.

If you’re evangelical, I’m sure you know what he’s talking about. Huge gatherings began to feel more important than small congregations as we were being fed more by our favorite podcast preachers than by our own pastors. The newest book written by a celebrity pastor overshadowed Bible study. Pressure mounted on already-exhausted church staff to reproduce the same production quality and charisma as national platforms. Stuff like that.

There were benefits, of course: wider reach for gifted communicators and unprecedented access to good teaching, in specific. I was personally blessed by it. But when it became more important than the local church, Big Eva became a big problem.

As Trueman points out, though, it seems those days are fading. What lingers is the lazy reflex to call any establishment-adjacent voice “Big Eva”—usually because they’ve written for Christianity Today, or spoke at T4G, or contribute to The Gospel Coalition, or something to that effect. Basically, if you’ve ever questioned the wisdom of Christian nationalism, or like reading Bonhoeffer, or think Kellerian “Third Way-ism” is still a virtue worth practicing, congratulations: you’re Big Eva now.

More recently, though, Trueman’s recently updated the diagnosis for our social-media age: Gig Eva.

The gig economy, in short, is the world of freelance work, i.e., independent contractors who trade institutional stability for personal flexibility. No bosses or benefits, but also no meaningful accountability. You drive your own Uber, rent out your own room, post your own content.

You are the brand. Anyone with a Røde mic, ring light, and a room with lots of shelved (mainly unread) books can freelance as a public theologian.

Now, to be fair, not everyone with an online ministry presence fits that mold. Many who speak or write online are faithful pastors and lay leaders deeply rooted in their local churches. Their digital work supplements, rather than supplants, their pastoral calling.

Still, Trueman’s concern stands: when ministry becomes a side hustle, the medium ultimately shapes the message. Gig Eva rewards charisma over character and outrage over peace. And what used to happen from pulpits and classrooms now happens from cameras and keyboards, which are, by their very nature, unaccountable and mainly driven by clicks. The result, he warns, is an evangelical culture where everyone has a platform but few have a pastor.

Something similiar, I think, is happening in Mormonism.

Call it Gig Mo.

Gig Mormonism

Once upon a time, authority in Latter-day Saint life flowed predictably: Salt Lake spoke, Deseret Book published, and BYU harmonized. The General Conference pulpit and the official manual framed what counted as faithful teaching. It was centralized and correlated. You could call this “Big Mo,” Mormonism’s equivalent to “Big Eva”.

But, as the LDS Church is learning, correlation struggles to compete with the algorithm.

Today, an entire cottage industry of independent LDS influencers has emerged. You’ll find them especially on YouTube, but also on Insta, TikTok, and in your podcast feed. They’re narrating faith crises, parsing conference talks, or defending the Church with apologetic zeal. Some are post-Mormon, but many are all-in faithful. What unites them isn’t doctrine but medium: they work the feed. They post, react, monetize, repeat. And with that has come a new kind of Mormon subculture, one that’s part de-constructive, part apologetic, and (let’s be honest) part performative.

And like their evangelical counterparts, some have grown suspicious—even dismissive—of establishment-adjacent voices. Are you part of the New Mormon History? You’re probably a compromised scholar. Do you teach at BYU? You’re definitely too close to Salt Lake. Do you have a platform? You’re probably fluent in guarded candor since the donor’s are listening.

If you spend enough time online, you can feel it. I’m not going to name names,* but perhaps you’ve sensed it, too. That tone and rhythm, that gravitational pull of personality above principle. It’s not a Left or Right, post-Mo or faithful thing—it’s an everywhere thing. It’s less about the issues or informing or dialogue than it is about brand-building. Some peddle in activist pseudo-scholarship, others chase clicks through a kind of talk-radio sensationalism, still others turn disagreement into sport and treat fellow podcasters and thought leaders like targets, not partners.

You know it when you see it.

And I don’t mean to assign influencers to a “Gig Mo” class. Think of Gig Mo less as a group and more as a mode, i.e., something anyone can slip into, even briefly, when the pull of the platform outweighs the patience of reflection.

I think Gig Mo is growing because the algorithm rewards scandal and controversy more than careful thought. It’s not that their topics and discussions are untrue or unimportant (most of the time); rather, it’s that the medium prefers emotion more than reflection. One YouTube channel I have in mind ebbs and flows in viewership, and whenever the creator needs to pump up those numbers, another hit piece on a friend of mine gets published, like clockwork.

I’ve noticed, too, that some of the Church’s defenders don’t always sound like the Brethren. At least, they don’t to me (for what it’s worth, I’m not LDS). When the Brethren plead for peacemaking, some pay that plead with lip service, but then end up defending their Zion in a spirit Zion itself might not recognize. Perhaps, as Trueman noted, that’s because the same technology that gives everyone a platform also flattens tone, so the apologist and the apostate can start to sound strangely alike, i.e., confidently certain and chronically online.

Still, I think Mormonism has one advantage over evangelicalism: it can regulate its gigs to some degree. I’ve seen this happen, like when Gig Mo goes too far, and suddenly an influencer bows gracefully (quietly) from the stage. Because unlike Big Eva, where no one can call the meeting to order, the institutional Church still can. Salt Lake owns the pulpit. If an influencer crosses a line, there are ways—soft and hard—to bring them back into orbit.

Yet, there’s a paradox here. A faith that prizes unity—indeed, sees it as a distinguishing mark from traditional Christianity—can’t easily accommodate a fully democratized discourse. The very idea of one true church sits awkwardly beside a thousand YouTube prophets. Gig Mo may feel like a renaissance of authenticity, but it also risks fragmenting the coherence Mormonism prizes.

So, I suppose, the question isn’t whether the Church can rein it in; rather, it’s whether the gig impulse can coexist with correlation. (I suspect this tension will persist for a long time.)

To be very clear, this essay isn’t meant to dismiss the many respectable and established LDS content creators who have proven to provide genuine help to people navigating their faith or providing space for that navigation to occur. (You know who you are, my friends.) But the gig model also carries familiar temptations, so I think we ought to be cautious.

Like Trueman’s Gig Eva, Gig Mo thrives on perpetual reaction. And because the gig worker’s primary accountability is to the algorithm, the line between ministering and marketing grows thin.

📘 Coming February 2026: 40 Questions About Mormonism

If you’ve appreciated this essay, you’ll love my forthcoming book, 40 Questions About Mormonism (Kregel Academic). It’s written for traditional Christians who want clear, charitable, and biblically faithful answers to the most common questions about the Latter-day Saint faith and tradition.

*Because I’m sure some folks will want an example, no, I’m still not naming any. I will clarify, though, that I don’t consider well-established podcasts to be part of what I’ve called Gig Mo, and I’ve never appeared on a show or podcast I’d put in that category. If you and I have interacted privately at a conference or online, you’re very likely not Gig Mo either because I try very hard not to keep company with that sort of thing.