“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 accelerated online content consumption. Limited series like Under the Banner of Heaven and Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey brought “cults” into mainstream visibility. The deconstruction movement made ex-member narratives culturally legible. In the 1990s, hearing a Mormon de-conversion story meant flying 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 you get fact-checked in real time.

But that same democratization brings risks. Driscoll’s deletion doesn’t mean the work never happened or that people who downloaded it stopped circulating it. And for every resource that gets called out, dozens more circulate without scrutiny because expertise has thinned and accuracy drifts. The platforms reward spectacle over substance. That’s a serious problem.

And, 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, more humane, and 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 made possible only by the digital ‘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 clarified its position on the personal 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, that still means the KJV. That preference remains in place for practical and doctrinal reasons, e.g., there’s something instinctively familiar to a Latter-day Saint about the “Holy Ghost” that the “Holy Spirit” doesn’t quite carry in the same way.

But here’s what’s new, and why the change is noteworthy. 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 matters 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 remains the common baseline for the LDS Church, but it’s no longer the only permissible voice in the room.

And that’s what caught my attention.

Why?

Because as beautiful and historically formative as King James English is, language doesn’t stand still—it grows, changes, evolves. For modern readers, the King James Bible often introduces a secondary layer of interpretation: the biblical text moves from Hebrew and Greek into seventeenth-century English, and only then into modern understanding. 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, no translation can—but they do reduce the distance between the ancient text and the modern reader.

Here are my thoughts.

#1 A Pastoral Response

First, and most importantly, this lands on me pastorally.

I’m genuinely glad for Latter-day Saints. I love the Bible. As a teaching pastor, I spend most of my waking hours reading it, studying it, teaching it, and trying to help others hear it clearly. Not because it always says what I want it to say, but because it does its work on me whether I welcome it or not.

Sometimes the Bible confronts me, breaking through stubborn pride and self-deception (see Jeremiah 23:29). Sometimes it exposes what I’d rather keep hidden, judging motives and intentions I’ve learned to excuse (see Hebrews 4:12). Sometimes it simply gives light enough for the next step when the way forward feels dark and confusing (see Psalm 119:105). And when I’m worn thin, my prayer often reduces to simply asking God to comfort me by his word (see Psalm 119:28).

Why does the Bible do that?

Not because it’s magical—it’s not some codex of enchanted spells—but 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, instruction, and again and again the contours of the Lord Jesus himself, e.g., his 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 is 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).

Clarity matters because knowing Christ clearly draws us nearer to him. Obscurity rarely deepens devotion; it usually just exhausts it. 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 find the KJV’s English more an obstacle to overcome than simply illumination to behold.

So, what’s really changed is the removal of a quiet ambiguity: the LDS Church has said plainly that clarity in reading the Bible is a legitimate goal.

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

Some reactions to this change have quickly pulled up the LDS Church’s 8th Article of Faith: “We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly.”

If multiple English translations are now allowed, does that 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: 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’s been abandoned. The 8th Article remains operative.

What has changed is how it functions. Rather than serving as a blanket suspicion of modern translations, it now operates as a criterion for Latter-day Saints. Some translations serve clarity and understanding better than others, and comparison can help readers see that.

#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 then, as now, wasn’t the Bible itself. It was shared vocabulary 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. I’ve sense that concern, too, from some Latter-day Saints. Reading contemporary English translations isn’t a gateway to any Christian denomination; it’s a gateway to immediate, intuitive comprehension of the text. 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 act of 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 interpretive decisions, theological commitments, and practical priorities. The question isn’t whether interpretation is involved; it always is. The real question is whether those judgments are made carefully, transparently, and under the constraint of fidelity 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. These stay closer to the structure of the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek while updating vocabulary and syntax. They’re especially useful for study, teaching, and comparison with the KJV. Of the two, I think the NRSV will feel most natural for most Latter-day Saints.

The NLT represents a more dynamic approach, prioritizing meaning in clear, contemporary English. It shines for readers who struggle with dense prose or who want the Bible to read smoothly without constant explanation.

The NIV sits comfortably between those approaches and often works well for sustained reading and family study.

The NKJV deserves separate mention. It retains the cadence of the KJV while removing many archaic turns of phrase. Basically, it’s great for readers attached to the sound of the KJV but not its opaqueness.

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; there are more or less reliable translations.

In my experience, people with the strongest opinions about why this translation is the best—or 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, translation theory, and the long, technical arguments that professional translators and text critics trade in. That work matters, but for most of us—the overwhelming majority—there’s no obligation to contribute to the noise, repeat half-understood arguments, or defend a preferred translation as though the entire Christian faith depended on 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. Used together, they serve understanding rather than competing for loyalty.

#7 Let’s Get Practical

To see why consulting multiple English translations isn’t just permissible but actually helpful and wise, let’s slow down over a single, familiar verse.

James 1:5 is a fitting place to do that. 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. Instead, the goal is to watch the Hebrew and Greek come into focus as they’re rendered through different English lenses.

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 oddly restrictive: does God not give wisdom to women or children?

“Upbraideth not” presents the steepest hurdle. Be honest. You don’t know what that means instinctively. Most people either have to look it up or guess by context. The promise embedded in the verse—that God doesn’t scold, shame, or reproach the asker—sits behind a layer of linguistic opacity.

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.”

Here, several clarifications emerge.

“Gives generously to all” captures the force of 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” brings the emotional tone of the verse into view. 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 but as a good the reader actively seeks. The translators also describe God as “generous.” That adjective doesn’t appear explicitly in the Greek, but the move is interpretive rather than reckless. 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.” If the NIV brings us close to the heart of the promise, the NLT makes it unmistakable. 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. Americans talked about the ship for years afterward because it symbolized something new: that a fragile republic could project power overseas and defend its commerce against old-world empires. It reassured citizens that independence wasn’t merely declared but defended. You can still visit that same ship today in Boston, a surviving artifact from Joseph’s birth-era world.

All of this has reshaped how I imagine Joseph’s earliest world. He wasn’t born into a settled culture or a stable religious order but into a society already in motion, stretched between revolution and expansion, order and experimentation, inheritance and improvisation. Politics, faith, commerce, and imagination were all being renegotiated at once. Whatever else one makes of Joseph Smith, he grew up in a world where change wasn’t the exception but the very air breathed.

No wonder he would grow up 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.

Note: Thanks to everyone who subscribed after my last essay. It spread farther than I expected. For those new, this Substack is mainly an irenic evangelical look at LDS history, faith, and practice. It’s not typically about current events, so if that’s not what you’re into, no worries. Feel free to unsubscribe and keep your inbox clean. This is a second version of the essay, updated on June 16, 2026.

I recently wrote about evangelical reactions to the tragic murders in Michigan and the kind of rhetoric that too often fuels contempt for Latter-day Saints. Since then, I’ve gotten a lot of questions—mostly from evangelicals—about what I see as the difference between anti-Mormonism and honest (though polemical) engagement with Latter-day Saints.

It’s a good question, especially because it touches on so many others. Is street preaching in downtown Provo or outside General Conference anti-Mormon? Is it anti-Mormon to say “Joseph Smith was a false prophet?”

As an evangelical pastor, I’ve fielded plenty of practical questions over the years: What should I say when LDS missionaries come to the door? How direct should I be? How do I hold my convictions without being rude? Those are good questions, but behind all of them, I keep circling back to a deeper one. At what point does honest disagreement cross the line into anti-Mormonism?

Let me lay my cards down early: I believe evangelicals should be able to say, without being accused of malice, what we believe and why. We don’t believe Joseph Smith was a prophet or that the Book of Mormon is scripture or that the gospel was restored after a Great Apostasy. I don’t call it the Restoration out of personal conviction. I mean, it’s obvious we don’t believe LDS truth claims, isn’t it? If we did believe those things, we’d be Latter-day Saints. So, those statements are convictions, not contempt. They aren’t anti-Mormonism. Contra-Mormonism, sure, but not anti.

But there are ways of expressing those convictions that cross a line into something else entirely, ways that mock, misrepresent, or dehumanize. And that line has been crossed very publicly recently. There’s a difference between clarity and cruelty, and losing that distinction is where anti-Mormonism begins.

Sometimes it takes the form of false witness, framing things in a way that simply isn’t true, like when someone says, “Mormons worship Joseph Smith above Jesus Christ.” (The Michigan murderer was, allegedly, convinced the LDS Church was anti-Christ.) Sometimes it turns into sensationalizing, like stretching doctrine into crude or lurid caricature, as in, “Mormons believe Elohim had sex with Mary to conceive Jesus,” e.g., The God Makers. Other times it reduces to a lazy mischaracterization, a sort of half-joke, half-sneer that says, “All Mormons think they’ll get their own planet and a harem of wives to populate it when they die.”

These statements aren’t accurate, let alone entirely fair or charitable. Any truth in them is distorted beyond recognition, curated at the most sensational edge, stripped of context, and presented in a way meant to scandalize. Their purpose isn’t to clarify but to shock, to instill fear, and, in some hearts, that fear hardens into anger. (I’ve written on this, too.)

Now, to be clear, I think evangelicals ought to discuss our distinctives in contrast to Mormonism. By ignoring those convictions altogether, we risk falling into a shallow niceness that mistakes silence for love. If we don’t ever talk about our differences, we won’t truly know one another, only polite, synthetic versions of ourselves.

So, what “modes” of engagement exist between anti-Mormonism and conviction-less, syncretistic silence?

Inspired by conversations with friends, I’ve sketched out a kind of spectrum—different modes of evangelical engagement with Latter-day Saints. This isn’t a prescriptive model so much as a descriptive one. I’m not telling anyone what to do, apart from my cautions about anti-Mormonism and syncretism. What follows is simply the landscape as I’ve observed it—unfinished, still forming, but, I hope, recognizable to anyone who has spent time in this space.

(Just a quick aside before moving on. I wrote this essay primarily with evangelicals in mind, although I’m very aware of Latter-day Saints reading over my shoulder. If that’s you, I welcome it. My hope is that you hear not hostility but honesty, and that even where we disagree, you sense a desire for clarity with charity.)

The Three Modes of Evangelical Engagement

First is The Polemicist Mode, an apologetics-based, evangelistic-minded approach.

This is perhaps what evangelicals are most known for. It’s certainly the primary mode. As a missional movement, evangelicals are driven to evangelize, thus the name. The Polemicist Mode directly names differences and defends evangelical distinctives. It’s typically a one-way street, but doesn’t always have to be. In fact, conversational polemics have grown more popular over the years. At its best, it can be sharp but not cruel, aiming for persuasion rather than humiliation.

Think of street preaching and conversations on the sidewalk behind “Change My Mind” posters, or the work of evangelical apologetics organizations. Done rightly, this mode creates opportunities for evangelicals to express truth from their perspective clearly while still treating the Other with dignity. I think organizations like Mormonism Research Ministry and YouTube channels like God Loves Mormons are prime examples.

Rhetoricians operate differently than I tend to, but I appreciate that they’re at least engaging rather than ignoring. It’s a sign that they genuinely care, and as strange as that sounds to Latter-day Saints, some evangelicals actually do sincerely love Latter-day Saints and express that love by showing up and speaking what they believe is true.

That said, I’m admittedly a bit wary of what I consider a cottage industry of how-to resources that has grown within polemic evangelical engagement with Mormonism. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not opposed to people reading them. I just know from experience that if our understanding of Latter-day Saint faith and practice is mediated almost entirely through comparative guides (even good ones), we end up analyzing the Other rather than knowing our neighbor. It starts to feel like learning a foreign language only well enough to order food and ask for directions, rather than learning it to actually know and be known by the people who speak it. That difference—between functional vocabulary and relational fluency—is a serious one.

It’s worth imagining these resources in reverse. Picture a comparative how-to written for Latter-day Saints on confidently answering evangelical missionaries. The thought experiment makes a point about the format itself, i.e., a book built mainly to rebut the other side invites the other side to rebut it right back, in either direction, which can turn an act of understanding into a contest of counterarguments. That’s an observation about the genre, not a verdict on any author in specific, because plenty of these guides are careful and charitable. Admittedly, I’ve found myself drawn to lived accounts, like Lynn Wilder's Unveiling Grace, and I keep returning to that kind of book.

Second, there’s The Ambassadorial Mode, the relational, representative approach.

This mode is less about public argument and more about public presence. Ambassadors seek to represent evangelicalism with clarity and kindness, building trust across difference. They still name disagreements, but they do so in the context of hospitality and friendship. If the polemicist is aiming to persuade the mind, the ambassador is aiming to open the heart.

You can see this in things like YouTube channels such as Hello Saints! with Jeff McCullough, or evangelicals (especially in the Mormon Corridor) who invest years in neighborly dialogue with Latter-day Saints. I consider my forthcoming 40 Questions About Mormonism to be done in this mode, i.e., an exploration of the LDS Church that seeks to understand, not just refute.

But even here, there are trade-offs. The Ambassadorial Mode runs the risk of softening the edges of conviction in the name of kindness. Ambassadors can sometimes feel pressure to maintain the relationship at all costs, and in doing so, clarity can begin to blur, not maliciously, but gradually, through the slow drip of conflict-avoidance. I’ve certainly felt this. When hospitality becomes silence, the posture that began as charity can quietly drift toward ambiguity. And once that line blurs, it becomes difficult to recover clarity without feeling like you’re breaking the peace you worked so hard to build.

Then, there’s The Bridge-Building Mode, a dialogical, cooperative approach.

Here, the aim is less immediate persuasion and more long-term understanding. Bridge-builders look for common ground where evangelicals and Latter-day Saints can walk together, e.g., shared moral concerns, community service, honest theological dialogue. They recognize the importance of clarity, but they lean heavily on charity.

Examples include ministries like Standing Together, which tilled the soil in which the Mouw–Millet dialogues grew. I love Standing Together, and have supported it annually (for over a decade now), and am personally a beneficiary of it. I’ll admit, I was initially hesitant about this mode. Early on, I wondered if it blurred the line between understanding and endorsement, especially when I saw how warmly some evangelicals spoke of Latter-day Saint leaders. But the more I watched the ministry’s leader, Greg Johnson—whom I deeply respect—the more I came to appreciate the wisdom in what he’s built through Standing Together.

Now, I don’t consider these modes to be concrete categories assigned to rigid personality types. They’re more like assignments we take up depending on calling, context, or circumstance. Evangelicals can (and often do) oscillate between them. A person might take a polemicist stance with a lively LDS interlocutor, act as an ambassador over lunch the next day, and step into bridge-building at a community forum later on. But while there’s movement, most of us tend to camp out in one of these spots more often than the others.

For me, the Ambassadorial Mode feels most like home. That’s where you’ll find me 90% of the time, anyway. Bridge-building is a close second, and only rarely (usually in response to bellicose LDS apologists) will you find me stepping into the Polemicist Mode.

Why prefer one mode over the other? The answer depends on what you’re willing to trade off, and it’s important to name them honestly.

The Polemicist Mode is strongest on clarity. It leaves little room for misunderstanding where evangelicals (in aggregate) stand. But clarity comes at a cost: it often creates tension, and when handled poorly, that tension can sour into hostility. In it’s worst form, it slips into anti-Mormonism (more on that below).

The Ambassadorial Mode strikes a careful balance. It maintains clarity while lowering tension, since disagreements are couched in trust and relationship. But even here there’s a trade-off. Sometimes the concern to be gracious can soften convictions to the point that clarity feels muted.

The Bridge-Building Mode excels at reducing tension. It models respect, charity, and peace. Yet, the risk is that clarity can get lost in the pursuit of common ground. And if clarity evaporates entirely, what remains is little more than cordial coexistence, not true dialogue. In its worst form, it slips into syncretism, i.e., blending evangelical and Latter-day Saint convictions in a way that blurs or even erases the real differences between them, and does disservice to both sides.

So, in one sense, evangelicals face a spectrum: the further we move toward clarity, the greater the tension; the further we move toward reducing tension, the greater the risk of losing clarity. Neither end is “wrong” in itself, but both come with dangers we should be aware of.

Let’s talk about those dangers.

Twin Opposite Pitfalls

I consider the following modes of evangelical engagement pitfalls to avoid at all costs: syncretism and anti-Mormonism.

First, syncretism. This is the blurring of convictions to the point that the real and serious differences between evangelical and Latter-day Saint faith are minimized or erased. It’s when the desire for peace and goodwill leads us to pretend we believe the same gospel when, in fact, we don’t. Let’s be real—differences of spiritual authority, doctrine, and practice create insurmountable obstacles to overcome. It’s okay to see them, name them, and discuss them, but let’s never pretend like they don’t exists. That’s just disingenuous. It may feel charitable in the moment to ignore differences, but it ultimately withholds truth, and withholding truth is not love.

Second, anti-Mormonism. This is the opposite error: seeing and naming differences, and then mocking, misrepresenting, or dehumanizing Latter-day Saints. It’s contempt masquerading as conviction, and can even lead to violence. It thrives on caricature and ridicule. It bears false witness against our neighbors.

You’ve seen it all before: memes that treat the Book of Mormon as toilet paper; sermons that make Latter-day Saints the punchline of a joke; online rants that brand every LDS temple as “demonic.”

One particularly egregious example was brought to my attention: a comment by an evangelical (I hesitate even to give him that title) who said,

“Gods going to burn every single Mormon in eternal hellfire. Back in the day we used to be able to get them there faster. Shame we can’t anymore.”

Let me be clear. This isn’t just anti-Mormonism; it’s sin. It’s evil, sociopathic slander that needs to be repented of. Who laments the inability to send anyone to hell faster? It’s sick.

But notice that critiquing Mormonism isn’t the same as being anti-Mormon. It’s possible—indeed necessary—for evangelicals to critically engage with Latter-day Saint history, beliefs, and practices without crossing that line. It isn’t hateful to say that Joseph Smith wasn’t a prophet or that the Book of Mormon isn’t scripture. I believe those things, and I say them regularly when clarifying my convictions. But there are certainly hateful ways to say them. Calling him “ol’ Joe” and reducing the Book of Mormon to demonically-inspired toilet paper, for instance, is not only unhelpful, it’s stupid.

In fact, over the years, I’ve come to the conviction that quality critical engagement with Latter-day Saints is actually evidence of respect. Evangelicals who dedicate time and energy to understanding Mormonism aren’t motivated by contempt, but by the conviction that truth matters and people matter. But because most evangelicals don’t think about Latter-day Saints at all, there’s a sort of asymmetry in the relationship. Latter-day Saints are used to being discussed, analyzed, and missionized. Evangelicals aren’t. So, when a small number of us do step into that space, we need to remember: (1) we are de facto representatives of evangelicalism, whether we like it or not, (2) we’re late to a conversation others have been having about us for generations, and (3) because of that, we enter with a deficit of awareness, not a surplus of authority. I think that should make us slower to speak and quicker to listen.

And if you can’t get there, then don’t, because there’s a deeper point here. If we can’t get the ABCs of the gospel right, we have no business pretending we’re ready for the advanced things. The ABCs are clear enough. Jesus said, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength” (Matt. 22:37–38; Deut. 6:5), and, “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt. 22:39; Lev. 19:18). The entire Law hangs on these two commands. Add to that the Golden Rule, “Do to others what you would have them do to you” (Matt. 7:12), and the “new commandment” He gave His disciples, “Love one another, just as I have loved you” (John 13:34).

If we ignore these basics while rushing headlong to debate the nature of God, the authority of scripture, or questions of salvation, heaven, and hell, then we’ve missed the order of things. The foundation of gospel engagement is love. Without that, whatever else we build will be crooked.

That’s why I can’t stand anti-Mormonism.

It’s genuinely love-less.

Dr. Iscoll and the Woman of Samaria

So, how can evangelicals avoid anti-Mormonism and syncretism? There are myriad examples in the Bible, but my favorite is Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well.

In John 4, when He met her there, Jesus didn’t belittle her, mock her Samaritan scriptures, or ridicule her Samaritan temple. He discussed truth with clarity, yes, but He did so while offering living water.

(I realize that Latter-day Saints may bristle at this analogy because it assumes evangelical Christianity as the wellspring of truth, but bear with me. My point isn’t to exalt one side and demean the other. My point is to show the stark difference between contemptuous rhetoric and Christlike engagement.)

To understand this point, I’ll end with a remix of the Woman at the Well passage with the bellicose, anti-Mormon rhetoric of, say, a famous evangelical named Dr. Iscoll.

Now when Dr. Iscoll had wearied himself with the journey, he sat down beside Jacob’s well. It was about the sixth hour.

There came a woman of Samaria to draw water, and Dr. Iscoll said to her, “Give me a drink.”

The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that thou, a Jew, askest a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.

Dr. Iscoll answered her, “Thy scriptures are fit only to hold open doors and to serve as refuse; thy temple is the haunt of demons; and verily, not one Samaritan shall enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that thou art a prophet of wrath and not of mercy. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and ye say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship. But dost thou bring no good tidings, save curses?”

Dr. Iscoll said to her, “I tell thee the truth: every Samaritan shall perish in hell, for none of thy people shall in nowise enter the Kingdom of God.”

The woman left the well, and said within herself, “Surely this man bringeth no living water, but bitterness. I will not tell the city of him, save to warn against him and his disciples, for his words are hard, and there is no hope in them.”

And thus the well was silent, and no harvest was gathered in that place.

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So What?

This remix shows what happens when anti-Mormon rhetoric replaces witness. There’s no good news left, only bitterness. There’s no invitation to life, only condemnation. And if our words drive people away from the living water of Christ, then we are not evangelizing, we are vandalizing the gospel.

So, let me close with this: evangelicals, we’re not called to mock. We’re not called to caricature. We’re not called to treat our neighbors as if they were less than human. We are called to bear faithful witness to Jesus Christ—who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life—by speaking the truth in love. That means holding our convictions without cruelty and showing compassion without compromise.

If we can’t get the basics right—to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves—then we have no business pretending we’re ready for the advanced things of the gospel.

Be clear with your convictions, but let it always be tempered by charity. Build bridges where you can, speak honestly when you feel that you must, but let everything you say and do be marked by the Spirit of the Lord Jesus.

📘 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.

The woodcut above is the frontispiece of Mormonism Unvailed (1834), the first full-length anti-Mormon book. The caricature of Joseph Smith literally being kicked by Satan while clutching the gold plates (Book of Mormon) is satire, sure, but let’s be honest, it’s a visual shorthand for contempt.

From the very beginning, polemics against the Latter-day Saints have relied on ridicule, exaggeration, and demonization. Nearly two centuries later, our rhetoric often hasn’t moved far from this impulse. What was once printed in woodcut now circulates in memes, tweets, and sermon clips, and the fruit is the same: dehumanization.

Such a thing has awful, evil consequences.

On Sunday, September 29, a gunman entered a Latter-day Saint meetinghouse in Grand Blanc, Michigan. By the time it was over, four members of the congregation were dead, others were wounded, and the building itself was reduced to ash. The shooter, Thomas Jacob “Jake” Sanford, was a veteran with a history of mental health struggles. Investigators are still assembling the picture, but reports already suggest one grim certainty: he carried a particular hatred for the Latter-day Saints. That hatred turned into violence, and it cost innocent lives. This, at a time when the LDS Church had just lost is president, Russell Nelson.

When news reached me, I opened evangelical corners of the internet to see how others were reacting. It only took mere minutes before I saw what I had feared but expected.

Instead of grief, I saw boundary-marking.

Instead of lament, I saw whataboutism.

Instead of compassion, I saw concern thinly veiled as care.

This wasn’t true everywhere. Some evangelical orgs and podcasts were quick to express sincere condolences and encouragement for prayer. But what I saw was enough to make me think, “Enough is enough.”

For example, I saw one social media account turn the tragedy into an opportunity to highlight LDS doctrinal error, as if a fire and four dead people were the time to rehearse theology. “They’re our neighbors that we ought to care about and care for but”— Stop.

Just… stop with concern-trolling: feigning care while drawing attention away from grief and toward boundary-marking. Feigned compassion without real care is no compassion at all. It’s an emotional lie.

This kind of reaction, along with the others I saw, are the reflexes of a community that’s grown too comfortable with rhetorical shortcuts. We’re so accustomed to defining ourselves against the Other that even a murder scene becomes a platform for it.

Why is that?

I think three dynamics are at work.

The first is that evangelical leaders and influencers fail to appreciate how their voices echo and amplify among their followers. A snide joke from a pulpit or a clever insult on social media may seem like nothing more than edgy rhetoric, and it rewards them with those precious likes and subscribes. But, at a deeper level, it teaches an audience how to imagine their neighbors. And audiences always push further than their teachers.

The second is that much of our rhetoric is unfounded and borders on bearing false witness. We’re quick to caricature Latter-day Saint beliefs, often at the expense of truthfulness. Scripture is plain: “A false witness will not go unpunished” (Prov 19:5). Is Mormonism in keeping with the historic orthodoxy of the Christian faith? By no means. Its very raison d’être was to restore what Joseph Smith believed had been lost, i.e., the true church. But does that give us license to misrepresent it? By no means. Caricature and exaggeration may win applause, but they break the ninth commandment and, in moments like these, they dehumanize.

The third is that we aren’t approaching the Other biblically. Christ calls his followers to gentleness, compassion, and love, even toward enemies (if you want to consider Latter-day Saints this way, which you shouldn’t). How much more toward neighbors? Yet, in our zeal to win arguments, we often lose sight of what the Lord Jesus actually requires, what He actually wants and honors.

Mark Driscoll As a Case Study

Mark Driscoll offers a case study for these three points.

For those unfamiliar, Driscoll rose to prominence in the early 2000s as the brash, foul-mouthed pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle. Lots of people in my age group turned or returned to faith because of him. He became a darling of the Young, Restless, Reformed movement, then crashed spectacularly under the weight of his own character flaws. After resigning in disgrace—having refused church discipling and accountability—he simply resurfaced in Arizona, rebranding himself as a charismatic-style preacher. In recent years, he’s leaned hard into MAGA-inflected evangelicalism.

If you want to understand this trajectory in more detail, listen to The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast from Christianity Today.

Now, before going any further, to be extremely clear, I’m not accusing Mark Driscoll of any kind of accomplice, co-conspirator, or instigation in the Michigan murders. I’m calling into question how rhetoric like his is poisoning public discourse and shaping evangelical perceptions of Latter-day Saints under the guise of boldness and truth-telling.

Admittedly, when I first heard Driscoll, I liked him. He resonated with my yearning for a preacher to speak from conviction at the convicted. But the luster waned fast.

Honestly, it was the way he treated Others that pushed me off just as quickly as he pulled me in. That’s especially true of Mormonism, which is why I think Driscoll is a good case study.

The first time I remember Driscoll ever mentioning Mormonism was in an off-handed joke about seeing Mormon missionaries riding their bikes to hell. The audience laughed, he grinned, but I cringed. I realized how easy it was for a cheap laugh to disguise real contempt for Latter-day Saints, and I didn’t like it.

That was years and years ago, but Driscoll recycles material, like any good comedian, so it’s unsurprising he posted something similar in 2023 on Facebook—227 “lols” later. (The comedian comment isn’t a jab; Driscoll himself said from the pulpit he wanted to become one and that pastors should learn from the comedian’s craft. Perhaps so, but he seems to have learned the wrong lessons.)

He’d probably excuse this mockery by pointing to 1 Kings 18, where Elijah taunts the prophets of Baal: “Either he is musing, or he is relieving himself, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened.” But that passage isn’t a license for ridicule. The point isn’t that mocking idolatry is a pastoral duty, but that idolatry is deadly.

Anyway, fast-forward to September 2024, when he tweeted a photo of the Book of Mormon with the caption, “PSA: this brand of toilet paper doubles as a doorstop.” He later deleted it, but the same clip lingered on his YouTube channel for some reason.

Mockery like this may pass as humor, but it signals contempt—a modern version of the Mormonism Unvailed frontispiece.

Less than a year later, when Charlie Kirk was assassinated, Driscoll declared online: “The assassin was a Mormon. This is not the same as Christianity. It is a demonic cult. Mormonism’s Jesus is no closer to the Christ of the Bible than Islam’s Jesus is.”

Turns out, the assassin wasn’t “Mormon” in the sense Driscoll assumed, but that was beside the point. Accuracy yielded to the reflex of demonization. “The assassin was a Mormon” has baked into it the implication that no true Christian would assassinate someone, especially not a religious political leader. The mob at Carthage in 1844 would beg to differ.

Anyhow, the very next day, Driscoll escalated: “There will be zero Mormons in Heaven. It is a demonic cult. A literal demon is on the top of every Mormon building.”

What began as ridicule metastasized into unhinged theological assault, damning an entire people as demonic.

If the people are members of a demonic cult, and the buildings feature demonic symbols, then why be surprised when someone with mental illness and hatred toward Latter-day Saints eventually treats them like enemies to be destroyed?

Sadly, tragically, someone did.

In the aftermath, Driscoll posted a softer line in response: “The murder of innocent people is evil, no matter if they’re Jewish, Muslim, Mormon, or Christian.”

Well, no duh, Mark. Good on you for recognizing the act was evil. But words can’t be unsaid, and caricatures can’t be erased by belated disclaimers.

Listen:

What leaders do in moderation, followers do in excess.

Read that again.

If a pastor calls the Book of Mormon a doorstop, a follower may call it trash. If a leader brands the LDS Church a demonic cult, a follower may feel justified in treating Latter-day Saints less than human. And if contempt becomes normalized, some one will eventually embody it in action.

And some one did.

And now people are dead.

A Plea to Evangelicals (Especially Pastors)

This is why I plead with my fellow evangelicals, especially pastors: you have an obligation to tone down your rhetoric.

Stop boundary-marking during the moment of grief. Just “weep with those who weep.”

Stop excusing or minimizing with whataboutism. Just “weep with those who weep.”

Stop concern-trolling with pious-sounding disdain. Please, just “weep with those who weep.”

“There is a time to weep [and] a time to refrain from embracing” (Eccl 3:4–5), i.e., a time to lament with Latter-day Saints and a time to pull away from them when theological disagreements arise. I thought common sense was sufficient enough to help us discern when these moments occur, but apparently not.

In the end, just obey the Bible we claim to revere as inspired, inerrant, and infallible. Find better ways to explain disagreement.

Think about how you’d want to be treated, “then grab the initiative and do it for them” (Matt 7:12 MSG). No one wants to be a proselytism project. Bear the fruit of the Holy Spirit (see Gal 5:22–23) and express “genuine love; by truthful speech, and the power of God” (2 Cor 6:6–7 ESV). Put on “compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience” (Col 3:12 ESV), and when it comes to disagreements, discuss them with gentleness (see 2 Tim 2:25). Never perpetuate caricatures or outright lies about Mormonism, as this is tantamount to bearing false witness against your neighbor. Such behavior “shall not be unpunished” (Prov 19:5) because Jesus warned “on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak” (Matt 12:36 ESV). Tame your tongue (see Jas 3:8) and, in our digital age, tame your thumbs, too. Don’t post things about Latter-day Saints privately that you wouldn’t do so publicly. Foster dialogue that is edifying (see 1 Cor 14:26), charitable (see Col 4:6), and conveys genuine care (see Gal 5:14; Jas 2:8). Avoid unnecessary controversy (see Titus 3:9). “Refrain from anger and give up your rage” (Ps 37:8 CSB) because “an offended brother is harder to reach than a fortified city” (Prov 18:19 CSB). Latter-day Saints are especially averse to anger because the Book of Mormon warns them that “he that hath the spirit of contention is not of me [Jesus Christ], but is of the devil” (3 Nephi 11:29). Abhor pride (see Prov 27:2). “Follow not that which is evil, but that which is good” (3 John 11). Glorify God through Christ by acknowledging him in all things, “and he shall direct thy paths” (Prov 3:6) by the Holy Spirit. “Let all that you do be done in love” (1 Cor 16:14 ESV).1

If you think explaining to thousands of people how Mormons aren’t Christian while the coroner is still transporting murdered bodies to the morgue isn’t uncharitably “careless,” then you’re deceived.

If you can, with a straight face, tell me that joking about cycling to hell and equivocating the Book of Mormon with toilet paper and doorstops and calling the LDS Church a demonic cult is something “done in love” to Latter-day Saints with “compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience,” then you’re deceived. That kind of rhetoric paves the way for something truly demonic.

Four Latter-day Saints are dead.

Will evangelicals continue to perpetuate careless words that dehumanize our LDS neighbors, or will we learn to speak to truth with love, compassion, and respect? Our rhetoric can either sow seeds of hate or bear witness to Christ.

May God give us the wisdom and humility to choose the latter.

Update (October 1, 2025):
Since writing this, Mark Driscoll has offered what amounts to a contextualized excuse. It’s not an apology. Saying murder is evil is the bare minimum, not repentance. Repentance would mean naming his reckless words as foolish, owning the harm they cause in aggregate to the evangelical Zeitgeist, and refusing to repeat them. Until then, his rhetoric continues to fuel contempt.

Again, I am not (nor ever would) directly blame him for the murders. I am singling out his rhetorics as a prominent example of reckless evangelical rhetoric that normalizes contempt.

In Part 1, I argued that the debate over Joseph Smith’s polygamy is less about marriage customs and more about LDS prophetology. On one side, those who affirm Joseph’s polygamy acknowledge that he concealed his plural marriages from the public while he was alive. On the other side, those who deny Joseph’s polygamy argue that Brigham Young and the Twelve concealed its true origins by retroactively attributing D&C 132 to Joseph’s revelations after his death. Either way, the issue circles the same question: what does concealment (Joseph) or doctrinal retrofitting (Brigham) say about the trustworthiness of prophetic authority in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?

Some readers pushed back, suggesting that framing the question this way risks hardening it into a binary contest over which prophet lied. I get that, but it’s not the point I’m trying to make. What interests me here isn’t which side is correct—I don’t have a dog in the fight—but what prophetic concealment (Joseph) or misrepresentation (Brigham) reveals about how truth is conceived in Latter-day Saint prophetology.

So, to get there, in this second part, I turn to to what I call the “Abraham precedent”—the conviction that a prophet may conceal or misrepresent marital status as obedience rather than deceit, a protective duty justified by God. In this light, a prophet’s concealment of marriage—whether chosen or commanded—can be seen not as failure but as obedience, a safeguard until what he judges to be the appointed time for disclosure.

Admittedtly, I’m for sure not the first to notice this dynamic, but here I want to show how it speaks directly into present questions surrounding LDS prophetology. So, let’s begin with a question: What if, in the minds of Joseph and Brigham, the concealment itself of plural marriage could be understood as part of their prophetic role? What if they were sincere in their deception? And where would they get that idea?

(Personally, I don’t like that, but I’m not writing this essay to express what I think is right. I’m writing to express what I think Joseph and Brigham believed was right, and what such belief reveals about LDS prophetology.)

Ok, first up: the biblical stories about the prophet Abraham and his wife, Sarah (or, depending on how you read it, his sister.)

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Abraham’s Half-Sister Wife

In Genesis 12, Abram (later Abraham) and his wife, Sarai (later Sarah), traveled to Egypt during a famine. Just before they entered, he expressed a concern:

“Look, I know what a beautiful woman you are. When the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife.’ They will kill me but let you live. Please say you’re my sister so it will go well for me because of you, and my life will be spared on your account” (Genesis 12:11a–13, CSB).

Basically, Abraham was afraid the Egyptians would kill him to ‘take’ her, so Abraham asked her to conceal their marital status by telling people she was his sister. Sarah agreed, and Pharaoh did, in fact, ‘take’ her into his house (you can read between the lines). But God intervened by cursing Pharaoh with some disease, so Pharaoh expelled Abraham and Sarah from Egypt, and actually enriched his wealth (12:16, 20).

I know… Über plot twist, right?

Notice how, in Genesis 12, deception is Abraham’s idea. It’s a calculated dodge to protect himself. The text frames the patriarch as fearful and self-serving, while God shields Sarah and intervenes for Abraham.

Now, you’d think this is the sort of thing a husband would do only once in his life. But apparently, if Abraham learned a lesson, it was the wrong one.

Genesis 20 finds Abraham repeating the maneuver, this time in Gerar. Again, he passed Sarah off as his sister, and again a king—Abimelek this time—‘took’ her. But before the ‘taking’ could be consummated, God appeared to Abimelek in a dream:

“You are about to die because of the woman you have taken, for she is a married woman” (20:3, CSB).

Abimelek immediately returns Sarah in the morning as Abraham’s ruse is exposed. Then, he gets even more stuff.

Notice how, in both episodes, God steps in to shield Sarah (12:17; 20:3–4). And just as striking, Abraham walks away not diminished but enriched. He actually gains wealth (12:16, 20; 20:14–16) and property (20:15). So, what looks to us like Abraham’s weakness turns out to be an opportunity for God’s protection and provision to Sarah and Abraham, respectively.

Unlike Genesis 12, however, chapter 20 clarifies the rational behind Abraham’s strategy. The prophet defends himself by a technicality. He tells the king:

“Besides, [Sarah] really is my sister, the daughter of my father though not of my mother; and she became my wife” (20:12).

So, he’s not outright lying. He’s just not telling the whole truth.

Moreover, Abraham framed this concealment as a good thing: a private, mutually agreed-upon act of “kindness” (20:13) between himself and his wife for his safety from outsiders. His fear, as he clarified, was twofold: first, that outsiders didn’t “fear God” (20:11), and second, that he was afraid for his life if his true marital status was known.

You might see where I’m going already: Abraham lied about his marital status because the truth could get him killed by outsiders. Joseph thought the same way.

Anyway, at this point, Genesis leaves us with a portrait of Abraham as a pragmatic prophet, i.e., a man willing to blur the truth of his marital status to preserve his life. The Hagar story (polygamy) complicates that legacy further, but we’ll return to it when Joseph himself does.

For now, concealment about marital status remains the central thread.

Abraham Did What Now?

Ok.

Admittedly, the Genesis 12 and 20 episodes are bizarre head scratchers. Naturally, they’ve left readers wrestling with Abraham’s integrity for generations.

Over the centuries, interpreters have tried to make sense of Abraham’s actions in different ways. Augustine argued that Abraham concealed rather than lied, preserving his honor by appeal to a technicality: Sarah was indeed his half-sister (20:12), a half-sister wife. (I checked—there’s no reality show called Half-Sister Wives, thankfully.)

Augustine put this interpretation forward as an apologetic against Manichean attacks on Hebrew scripture. They preferred their prophets neat and perfect, and instead of arguing for Abraham’s fallibility, Augustine argued for a technicality. His interpretation dominated for centuries, and it demonstrates an impulse in some biblical interpreters to clean up prophets.

By the medieval period, Thomas Aquinas advanced Augustine’s line by framing Abraham’s deception within moral theology. For Aquinas, Abraham “wished to hide the truth, not to tell a lie.”1 This distinction between hiding truth and formal lying was seen as a way for Abraham to maintain would become the ninth commandment while also safeguarding his moral integrity.

So, not only was it a technicality, but Abraham was actually pretty shrewd when you think about it.

The Reformers were less gracious. Martin Luther thought it obvious that Abraham was wrong for what he did. The prophet “willingly and knowingly exposes his wife to the danger of adultery,” in Luther’s eyes.2 John Calvin was equally appalled, opining how Abraham “although he did not lie in words, yet with respect to the matter of fact, his dissimulation was a lie, by implication.”3

It seems that most interpreters follow either the Augustianian-Thomist or Reformed interpretations. From my perspective, I think it’s a blend of both: Abraham may have played with technicalities, but if the point was to mislead, that’s de facto lying.

That’s where I land, anyway, but I also find myself drawn to a greater emphasis. When taken together, the Genesis 12 and 20 episodes highlight divine providence more than Abraham’s moral calculus. Abraham faltered, yes, but God protected and provided, rescuing Sarah and even enriching Abraham with livestock, servants, silver, and land (20:14–16). This reading shifts our eyes from Abraham’s concealment to God’s control.

In that sense, Abraham’s lack of forthrightness served the greater good of preserving his life, and God appears to have blessed the outcome. Still, the story remains odd—odd enough that later readers, Joseph Smith among them, would feel compelled to reframe it in their own way.

Joseph Smith and the “Abraham Precedent”

In the early 1830s, Joseph offered his own thoughts on the matter by revising the Bible in what became known as the Joseph Smith Translation (JST).4 In his rendering of the story, Abraham’s instructions to Sarah were ever-so-slightly reshaped. Where the King James Bible makes Abraham’s request sound like a calculated half-truth—“say, I pray thee, thou art my sister”—the JST instead has Abraham say:

“Say I pray thee unto them I am his sister that it may be well with ​me​ for thy​ sake and my soul shall live because of thee” (12:13, JST)

Notice how Joseph reframed that line, tweaking it from Abraham’s anxious request into Abraham’s script, i.e., he literally tells Sarah what to say. The difference is super subtle but very telling. KJV Abraham has Sarah claim a half-truth, but JST Abraham coaches her in the precise line she should deliver.

Why the change, and what’s the effect? Hard to say with any degree of certanty. But I do think it foreshadows Latter-day Saint men who would eventually coach their plural wives on what to say about their marital status. That works whether one believes Joseph himself rehearsed denials with his wives or, conversely, that Brigham pressured women after Joseph’s death into swearing affidavits under duress.

Anyway, Smith’s revision of Genesis shows him taking his first step in a centuries-long interpretive struggle: was Abraham lying (a la Luther and Calvin) or merely concealing (a la Augustine and Aquinas)? Joseph’s not ready to give an answer yet, but he’s certainly willing to maintain one fact about the story: Abraham chose to conceal his relationship with Sarah rather than risk his own life.

But, apparently, something about the story bothered Joseph. If, as God said to Abimelek, Abraham was “a prophet” (Gen. 20:7), then surely his actions had to be read through the lens of prophetic legitimacy, not moral lapse. A prophet might falter, but he couldn’t finally be framed as a deceiver (μὴ γένοιτο, apparently). So, why would the patriarch of God’s covenant people tell such a questionable half-truth?

The answer, for Joseph, came from the most unexpected place. In 1835, he purchased Egyptian mummies and papyri from an antiquities dealer, believing some of the fragments contained the writings of Abraham. He began translating portions with his scribes, publishing the results in 1842 as the book of Abraham in a church newspaper. The text was later included in the Pearl of Great Price and canonized by the LDS Church.

In the book of Abraham, the story is retold with a striking twist. No longer is concealment Abraham’s cowardly idea (Genesis 12) or even his “kindness” to Sarah (Genesis 20). Instead, God Himself commands it: “Let her say unto the Egyptians, she is thy sister, and thy soul shall live” (Abraham 2:24).

Here is Joseph’s answer to the interpretive question: was Abraham lying or merely concealing? Joseph says, “That question is relatively moot because God told Abraham what to say.” The coaching elevates from Abraham-to-Sarah to God-to-Abraham. So, what had been Abraham’s desperate ploy in Genesis is now recast as divine directive. The moral burden shifts entirely—Abraham is exonerated, but only by making God the author of the obfuscated technicality.

Obviously, this retelling presents a theological difficulty: it portrays God as directing an act of deception. Some Latter-day Saint interpreters have leaned on this to argue for exceptions to the general commandment against lying in moments of moral asymmetry, e.g., lying to the Nazis to spare the Jewish family hiding in your residence.5 I’m not entirely convinced—I think all lies still fall short of perfection and require forgiveness—but that’s beside the point of this essay. What matters here is the precedent the book of Abraham established for Joseph.

I think the most striking development in Joseph’s interpretation of Abraham came in 1843, when he received what became Doctrine & Covenants 132, i.e., the revelation on plural marriage that explicitly invokes Abraham as a divine precedent.

The revelation began with a question, with Joseph desiring “to know and understand” how or why God allowed the Old Testament patriarchs to take additional wives, e.g., Hagar.6 In D&C 132, Abraham’s plurality is explicitly justified. And if it was justified for the former-day patriarchs, then God could justify polygamy for the latter-day patriarchs.

The revelation doesn’t mention Abraham’s concealment, but given Joseph’s earlier interpretive work in the JST and book of Abraham, the precedent of concealment and the precedent of plurality now sit side by side. Together they form the theological scaffolding Joseph could lean on in Nauvoo: polygamy as righteousness, concealment as obedience.

Explained another way, imagine the former-day prophet, Abraham, in the mind of the latter-day prophet, Joseph Smith. What had been Abraham’s concealment in Genesis—recast as coaching in the JST and divinized in the book of Abraham—was, by D&C 132, expanded to embrace his polygamy as well. The Book of Mormon had condemned the practice, but also left a narrow exception (“to raise up seed”), and D&C 132 made that exception explicit: Abraham’s plurality was righteous. The revelation never mentions his half-truths about Sarah, but Joseph—having already reinterpreted those stories—could easily see concealment and plurality side by side, both framed as obedience to God’s purposes.

Taken together, these layers form the theological foundation for the Abraham precedent: the conviction that God may require a prophet to conceal or misstate his marital status to preserve life and mission.

Of course, one could just as easily argue that this sequence was less organic development than post-hoc rationalization, i.e., each step Joseph took conveniently prepared the ground for his later practice of plural marriage. But, proving Joseph’s intent with absolute certainty is nearly impossible.

Anyway, in this view, concealment isn’t an immoral lapse to be excused but a duty to be obeyed. It’s a sort of ‘noble lie’ for a greater good. Early Latter-day Saint obfuscation of plural marriage need not have registered to them as “lying” in the ordinary sense. Rather, they could’ve seen themselves as behaving consistent with a divinely sanctioned pattern, affirmed by their scriptures and reinforced by Joseph’s own translation work of a polygamous prophet as one.

It’s no accident, then, that Nauvoo—where Joseph was privately practicing plural marriage while publicly denying it—became the proving ground for the Abraham precedent.

The Nauvoo Nightmare

By the early 1840s, Joseph Smith’s fears for his life and mission were hardly abstract. He’d already endured mob violence in Ohio, Missouri’s extermination order, and months in jail. In Nauvoo, rumors of his plural marriages spread like wildfire. Publicly he denied them, but privately he taught them as divine command to a select few. It was a dangerous balance legally, socially, and spiritually.

Naturally, he couldn’t prevent the tide of rumors.In fact, some of the fiercest opposition came from former allies—men like William Law, Joseph’s counselor in the First Presidency—who viewed the practice as corruption and proof that Joseph was a fallen prophet. So, when Law’s Nauvoo Expositor appeared in June 1844 with open accusations of adultery and deception, it struck at the core of Joseph’s fears. The exposé threatened his reputation, yes, but ultimately his safety.

“Surely the fear of God is not in this place,” Joseph must have thought.

This was exactly the kind of high-stakes environment where the precedent could take on immediate, personal relevance. If Joseph believed—based on his own revisions and the book of Abraham—that God had once commanded a prophet to obscure the truth about his marriage to preserve life and mission, then he may not have considered his public denials of plural marriage as immoral. They could have been framed as obedience, concealment as prophetic duty until what he saw as the “appointed time” for disclosure.

But, obviously, the precedent failed him. Abraham walked away from his obfuscations enriched. Joseph didn’t. The precedent couldn’t shield him from the fury of his critics, showing that what seemed theologically defensible in LDS scripture couldn’t bear the practical weight of Nauvoo’s dangers. Instead, accusations of polygamy became one of the central grievances that provoked the Expositor’s destruction and set in motion the chain of events that ended with Joseph’s death on June 27, 1844. The “appointed time” for Latter-day Saints to publicly reveal polygamy came only later, in 1852, when the Saints were secure in the Great Basin.

Even so, the Abraham precedent remains instructive. I don’t agree with the maneuver—nor do I particularly like it—but I could see how it could function to nuance the binary choice between “Joseph lied” or “Brigham lied.” On this reading, both men might have believed their concealment was not deception but obedience, i.e., an act of prophetic duty patterned on Abraham’s example (the JST-BofA-D&C Abraham, I mean).

And that’s the big point I wanted to make: their shared appeal to concealment reveals how truth itself could be conceived within Latter-day Saint prophetology.

Recall the scriptural pattern: Abraham could call Sarah his “sister” because they shared a father but not a mother (Gen. 20:12). It was a relationship real enough to claim, yet ambiguous enough to conceal. And in Joseph’s own retelling of the story, the book of Abraham went further still—God Himself commanded Abraham to misrepresent his marriage (Abraham 2:22–24).

That ambiguity offers a suggestive parallel to Joseph’s plural marriages. Under D&C 132, his sealings made the women his wives by revelation, but in civil law they remained unmarried. Like Sarah, their status could be told in two ways: wives in one sense, not-wives in another. In that sense, they were “half-wives,” a status that gave Joseph room to both affirm and deny the relationships, similar to how Abraham had done long ago.

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So What?

The present polygamy–monogamy debate, then, isn’t ultimately about who was telling the truth. It’s about how truth itself is understood within a LDS prophetic framework. And that—not our historical verdict—is the far more interesting and important question that needs to be asked.

In traditional Christian theology, concealment about matters of divine command is usually treated as deception, and deception compromises the messenger. In the Latter-day Saint tradition, however, Joseph’s own scriptures establish that concealment, under certain conditions, can be commanded by God. That opens the door for a very different calculus, i.e., withholding certain truths could be seen as protecting God’s work rather than undermining it.

That brings us right back to prophetology. If concealment can be a prophetic duty, who decides when it’s permissible? How does the community discern between God-directed withholding and human self-preservation? And what happens to trust when members only learn the truth in retrospect?

The current debate may be framed around Joseph’s marital practices, but, in the end, it’s seriously probing the boundaries of prophetic authority itself, which, I think, is why things are so emotionally charged.

If the Abraham precedent helped Joseph reconcile secrecy with obedience, then Latter-day Saints today are left to decide whether that precedent still governs prophetic behavior today, and, if it does, what it means for their confidence in those who claim to speak for God. After all, Joseph’s scriptural productions built on one another in just this way—“precept upon precept, line upon line”—until both plurality and concealment could be counted as prophetic duty.

In the end, that’s the unresolved question: not simply “Was Joseph a polygamist?” or “Was Brigham lying about Joseph being a polygamist?” but “How far can a prophet go in concealing God’s commands before he ceases to be trusted as God’s prophet?” Until that question is faced head-on, the monogamy–polygamy debate will remain a proxy for a much larger conversation about the nature, scope, and limits of prophetic authority within Mormonism.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

📘 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 debate is brewing within Mormonism that, at first glance, looks relatively benign. The question is simple enough, anyway:

Did Joseph Smith practice polygamy?

For most people, this question elicits a vague “Oh, yeah” recollection that Mormonism is somehow connected to polygamy, which then leads them to wonder whether Sister Wives is still running. (It is, for some reason.)

Within Mormonism though, it’s a different story.

A growing network of Latter-day Saints say he didn’t, and they’re challenging what many people (including myself) have long assumed to be settled history. The movement has gained enough steam that the LDS Church recently restated its stance: “Joseph Smith married multiple wives and introduced the practice to close associates.”1

Simple enough.

To lay out my cards early, in my reading of the historical sources, the evidence points to, “Yes,” Joseph did practice polygamy and introduced it to others. I’ve heard the arguments for a strictly monogamist Joseph, but have yet to be convinced. Admittedly, I’m far more familiar with polygamy in James Strang’s church than I am Joseph Smith’s, so I feel like I’m playing catch up. Still, I’m finding as time moves on, the more evidence is presented to argue Joseph was not a polygamist, the more convinced I am that he was.

But as I watch this debate unfold from my vantage point, I’ve come to the opinion that the core issue is less about 19th century Mormon marriage customs and more about prophetic authority. In other words, the debate is ultimately about what Joseph’s polygamy implies.

Someone isn’t telling the truth.

What’s At Stake

If Joseph was a polygamist, he was never forthright about it. In fact, on a number of occasions, he publicly denounced it. Perhaps the most famous moment was his tongue-in-cheek quip about being accused of adultery, of “having seven wives when I can only find one.”2 Joseph said this in May 1844, by which time, according to LDS and non-LDS historians alike, he’d already been sealed to more than two dozen women.3

Brigham Young, by contrast, was far less guarded. After leading the Saints west, he openly defended plural marriage as a divine principle revealed through Joseph, and Brigham personally took more than fifty wives. He repeatedly insisted that Joseph had practiced the principle, even recounting conversations in which Joseph taught him its eternal necessity.

This creates an unavoidable dilemma. If Joseph practiced polygamy, then he deceived the public when he denied it. But if Joseph didn’t practice plural marriage, which was actually introduced later by Brigham Young (who retroactively retconned polygamy into Joseph’s revelations), then Brigham misled the Church.

So, it’s unsurprising to me that this dilemma is occasionally relegated to the broader principle that prophets aren’t perfect. Within LDS thought, prophetic leadership unfolds through continuing revelation given to imperfect people. Joseph himself once said “I never told you I was perfect,”4 and taught that a “Prophet is not always a Prophet” unless acting in that role.5 And modern LDS leaders have reminded members that not every statement by a Church leader constitutes doctrine. This framework helps members distinguish between prophetic opinion and prophetic revelation.

But while Joseph said he wasn’t perfect, in the same sentence, he also reassured his people “there is no error in the revelations which I have taught.”6 Prophets may not be perfect, but the revelations are. And that’s the problem: polygamy in LDS history isn’t a peripheral matter that can be safely filed under “prophetic opinion.” It’s bound up with eternal marriage, exaltation, and salvation, and it entered Mormonism as divine revelation, which eventually achieved canonical status (D&C 132). It touches on the very link between God and His people that the LDS Church teaches runs through priesthood authority and the living prophet.

This is why the issue cuts deeper than disagreements over Adam-God or the Canadian copyright. It goes to the heart of prophetic trustworthiness, and, therefore, to the heart of LDS prophetology itself.

Prophetic Authority as the Core Issue

In LDS thought, the priesthood is the plumb line between God and His people, and the living prophet is the principle earthly office in that authority. Continuing revelation through prophets is the hallmark of the faith. It shapes doctrine, directs practice, and sets the LDS Church apart from other Christian traditions. If any chain in that link of authority is weakened, people are less apt to trust it. But if the principle link is weak—if the prophet himself can’t be trusted—then to a faithful Latter-day Saint, the whole thing may feel like it’s snapping.

If Joseph was lying about polygamy, was he lying about the First Vision or Book of Mormon or eternal marriage? If Brigham was lying about Joseph, was he lying about everything else?

So, it’s better to think of the debate as a struggle over which prophetic legacy can be trusted. Should members stand with Joseph’s public denials of polygamy? Or with Brigham’s insistence that Joseph taught and practiced it?

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Granted, I know that sounds overly binary, and I’ve noticed that people on both sides of this debate usually avoid stating their positions so bluntly. But when you follow their arguments to their logical conclusion, this is where they inevitably lead. And, to be very clear, I’m not suggesting that members are presently forced into this either/or choice. Rather, I’m observing that the logic of this particular debate seems to push toward such a choice, no matter how hard people push back, especially when it’s not even anyone’s intention to go there.

Frankly, I don’t envy faithful Latter-day Saints navigating this controversy. In a faith built on continuing revelation through prophets, questioning whether the founding prophets were truthful puts pressure on the core of everything the LDS restoration claims to be. It’s creating real division and straining relationships in real time. A historical question is becoming a test of faith, and members may soon find themselves forced to choose which prophet they believe.

And that’s an irony that I can’t shake.

The Monogamites vs. the Polygamites

Joseph Smith, as a young man, was unsettled by the divisions and bickering between Protestant denominations. In his 1832 history, he lamented that those of different sects “did not adorn their profession by a holy walk and Godly conversation” and his “mind [became] excedingly distressed” because he became convinced that humanity “had apostatised from the true and living faith.”7 To him, the divisions were obvious: “Priest contending against priest, and convert against convert,” each church “entirely lost in a strife of words and a contest about opinions.”8

That grief over division drove him to pray for clarity. The answer, he claimed, was the First Vision—Jesus Christ telling him that all existing churches were wrong and that none should be joined. Joseph’s later translation of the Book of Mormon echoed this theme, condemning the rise of “-ites” of every sort (see 4 Nephi 1:17)—i.e., sects and denominations—echoing the biblical urging for unity through “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (see Ephesians 4:5).

The persistence of denominations has ever since been a mainstay argument for the veracity of LDS prophetic authority.

Granted, I don’t like the divisions either. But traditional Christianity, for all its denominational differences, has historically rallied around a common authority: the gospel as preserved in the Bible and confessed in the ancient creeds. Latter-day Saints, however, look to living prophets as the touchstone unifier. When those prophets seem to contradict one another, that unity is tested. (Or, at least, I sense this is the direction the monogamy-polygamy debate is inevitably heading.)

And, so, a split emerges, creating two camps that, ironically, act as de facto denominations within Mormonism: the “Monogamites” and the “Polygamites.” Each insists it’s defending the true legacy of Joseph Smith.

Remember, too, that in LDS thought, denominationalism has long been taken as evidence that traditional Christianity forfeited divine authority. Yet, here the same dynamic appears inside Mormonism—a fracture over prophetic claims producing two de facto denominations. If division was once proof of lost authority in Christendom, what does division suggest about authority within the LDS Church today?

(LDS friends, please don’t read this as an apologetic jab. I’m pointing out an irony I think is worth self-reflection, returning a sincere courtesy for the many times I’ve been asked to account for the denominationalism of Protestantism.)

An Unresolved Prophetology

What we’re witnessing, I think, is an unresolved question at the heart of LDS prophetology, not just what a prophet is or does or can do, but what it means for a Christian church to be led by living prophets on earth. Can prophets err? If so, in what areas, how often, and in what ways? How do members discern between a prophet’s personal opinions and divine revelation? And when prophets seem to contradict each other, how should members respond?

To be fair, the LDS Church has tools for navigating prophetic fallibility, but I think they stop short of explaining what to do when a contradiction strikes at the very continuity of prophetic authority. Simply reaffirming the current position isn’t going settle the matter. In other words, it’s insufficient to summon a “Prophet is not always a Prophet” on this one.

So, given the current debate, what might an LDS approach to prophetology look like if it were developed enough to address such apparent contradictions head-on?

I’ll resist the urge to offer prescriptive solutions here, since it’s not my place as an outside observer. But I’ll note this: the structural differences between how traditional Christianity and Mormonism approach prophetic authority create different vulnerabilities.

Traditional Christians rarely think about past prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Habakkuk, etc.—beyond what their revelations said about God, His people, and His messiah. We sing no hymns to prophets, our artwork rarely features them, and we seldom (if ever) measure our faithfulness by our spiritual alignment to them as individuals. Sure, we pour over their words in the Bible and commentaries, but not to hear from them but through them. After all, as John the Baptist said, “He [Christ] must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). The prophetic role, for us, has always been to step aside so that the Lord Jesus stands foremost. We are led not by earthy living prophets, but by the gospel of the heavenly Prophet Jesus Christ (see Hebrews 1:1–3).

The LDS tradition, by contrast, regularly celebrates prophetic figures in song, imagery, curriculum, and conference addresses, which makes sense given the emphasis on continuing revelation through living prophets. They also view Christ as the Prophet, but see Him working in concert with—not in place of—those who hold the prophetic office today. That’s a completely foreign concept for traditional Christians, one that not even the Roman Catholic magisterium approaches in similitude.

This difference in prophetology shapes the way each community experiences questions of authority. When prophetic figures are so near to faith identity, as they are in Mormonism, contradictions between them become more destabilizing than they might be in traditions where prophets are viewed more as conduits.

This observation isn’t meant as cold critique but as analysis: different theological frameworks create different points of vulnerability. The current debate simply highlights one such vulnerability within LDS thought.

Anyway, and at any rate, I think this moment presents an opportunity for deeper reflection on the nature of divine authority itself. Rather than seeing this as a crisis requiring defensive positions, it might be viewed as an invitation to examine what provides ultimate spiritual certainty.

I’m not suggesting the debate end; rather, that it be couched as a subset of a more foundational issue—LDS prophetology.

Until Latter-day Saints can articulate a coherent framework for how prophetic authority works when prophets contradict one another—especially on matters claimed as divine command—the controversy over Joseph’s practices will remain a proxy battle.

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Beyond the Binary (Looking Toward Part 2)

Until then, I’m sensing that the debate will eventually stalemate at a binary (no matter how hard researchers and historians will try to keep it from this): if Joseph was truthful, Brigham was not; if Brigham was truthful, Joseph was not.

But what if there’s another possibility, one that sidesteps the binary altogether (as a historical explanation)? What if both men believed they were acting under what they believed was a prophetic mandate to withhold or obfuscate certain truths for what they saw as a greater good?

In the biblical story, Abraham’s life is one of deep faith and glaring flaws. Twice, fearing for his life, he convinced his wife, Sarah, to conceal their marriage by emphasizing their blood relation. To later readers, the act was morally troubling, i.e., an apparent failure of faith that put Sarah in harm’s way.

In Joseph Smith’s revision of Genesis 12, however, the deception isn’t Abraham’s idea at all, but God’s command. For nineteenth-century Bible believers, this change resolved a moral dilemma but created a theological precedent: if God could direct a prophet to conceal the truth about marriage for the sake of life and mission, then divinely sanctioned obfuscation was possible.

That precedent applies uncomfortably well to the current debate. Could Joseph, or Brigham, have seen themselves acting in such a way, believing concealment was part of their prophetic duty? And if so, what would that mean for how we interpret their legacies?

In part two, I’ll explore this possibility and the canonical precedent that makes it plausible.

📘 Coming Soon: 40 Questions About Mormonism

If you’ve appreciated this essay, you’ll love my forthcoming book, 40 Questions About Mormonism (Kregel Academic, this coming winter). 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.