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.

📘 40 Questions About Mormonism

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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. ; )

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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.

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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.

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.

And it’s super weird to think about ‘how-to’ resources in reverse, e.g., Introducing the Restoration to Evangelicals: A Practical and Comparative Guide to What the Prophets Teach or Responding to the Evangelical Missionary Message: Confident Conversations with Evangelical Preachers (and Other Traditional Christians). I’m not sure how many Latter-day Saints would find that approach genuinely illuminating, and they’d probably be picked to the bones by evangelical apologists. For what it’s worth, I’ve found more light in lived accounts—like Lynn Wilder’s Unveiling Grace—than in step-by-step rebuttal manuals.

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.

I’m writing a book review for the first time in a long while. It’s on John Turner’s biography of Joseph Smith, which will appear in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society (hopefully).

As I set out to do this work, I found myself reaching backward before moving forward, back to what is perhaps the best advice I’ve ever read about writing critical reviews, and about receiving criticism as an author.

If you’re a writer and you’ve never read C. S. Lewis’s essay On Criticism, I highly recommend it. You can find it [here]. If you’re not a writer, don’t worry. On Criticism has a lot of application for everyday social media, too.

The essay’s relatively short, evergreen in its wisdom, and gently persuasive in that very Lewisian way. His prose stirs curiosity rather than forcing ideas on you. Though Lewis never lived to finish On Criticism, the core of the argument stands whole.

He begins with the simple and devastating observation that we’ve largely misunderstood the role of the critic. The job, as it’s commonly assumed, is to judge a work. We read it, mull it over as we rub our chin, then slam our gavel of opinion to pronounce works “good” or “bad” like we’re handing down scholarly sentences. But for Lewis, this approach, at best, is premature. At worst, it’s arrogant.

Instead, the proper task of criticism isn’t primarily judgment but discernment, i.e., not the final word, but the first patient word, seeking to understand what a book is doing and how it works and whether we, as readers, have ears to hear it.

With that in mind, I’ve jotted down four rules for myself as I step into this review. They aren’t exhaustive, of course, but they’re a helpful beginning.

Maybe you’ll find them so, too.

Rule #1: Nothing Is “New”, Not Even That ‘Novel’ Novel

Blame it on the internet’s appetite for novelty, or the Ecclesiastian observation that we think things are novel, but the word “new” gets thrown around a lot in reviews. That’s why Lewis cautioned against calling a book or idea in a work “new.”

It may intuitively seem like a nice thing to do, if you want offer a positive review. Descriptions like ‘fresh’ and ‘original’ sound complimentary. That’s especially true in a society like ours that values innovation—‘newness’ is inherent to it. The latest is the greatest, we’re told. So, lauding an author for her ‘new’ idea or slant or take is a good thing, right?

No, says Lewis.

Labeling something ‘new’ is actually a “concealed negative” review dressed up as a positive one. The predicate ‘new’ is “committing oneself to the negative that no one had done it before. But this is beyond one’s knowledge; taken rigorously, it is beyond anyone’s knowledge.”

In other words: beware chronological snobbery dressed up as praise. The reviewer who calls something “new” may think they are applauding innovation. But what they’re actually doing is overreaching. It’s “new”? Oh, really? In what sense? In this generation? In your own reading life? And compared to what?

For example, I loved Andy Weir’s The Martian (2011), a suspenseful story about astronaut Mark Watney stranded alone on Mars with only his ingenuity and scientific knowledge to survive until rescue. But let’s be honest: The Martian borrows—likely unconsciously—from the basic premise of Robinson Crusoe (1719). It tells a very familiar story, i.e., isolation, resourcefulness, and the human drive to return home. The difference is in the details, not the substance. So, The Martian isn’t really “new” in that sense. In fact, there’s a 1964 book titled Robinson Crusoe on Mars.

And that’s okay. Why? Because… “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun,” said Ecclesiastes (1:9) thousands of years ago.

“Even my writing?” you may wonder. Yes, yours too, because “of making many books there is no end” (Ecclesiastes 12:12). It’s ok… just admit it, get over our culture’s incessant desire for ‘novelty’, and move on. Did someone write it today? I’ll give you 10:1 odds there’s a correlating general principle buried somewhere in the writings of some obscure medieval monk tucked away in Cambridge’s archives.

On a personal note, with 40 Questions About Mormonism on the publication horizion, I hope no one sees anything “new” in my approach to Mormonism. It’s different, sure—hopefully refreshing in its framing—but I stand in a long line of traditional Christians who’ve written on the subject, including the likes of Jan Shipps and Douglas J. Davies and William H. Whitsitt. I’m not comparing my skill to these scholars, only the approach they took to Mormonism.

Anyway, when reviewing or giving your opinion about a work, let your readers know what’s different or important or persuasive or tired, but don’t mistake your limited view of the past for the sweep of history.

Whether you’re writing a scholarly review or responding to someone’s post, resist the urge to declare something ‘unprecedented’ when what you really mean is that it’s unfamiliar to you.

Better to hedge than to overreach.

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Rule #2: Create More Than You Criticize

This rule comes directly from Lewis’s own admonition:

“Let no one try to make a living by becoming a reviewer except as a last resource.”

A little old-fashioned? Yeah, for sure—very few people actually make a living reading and writing reviews these days. But were Lewis alive today, he’d roll his eyes at the kind who use those moody, ink-stroke New Yorker caricature avatars as their profile pic.

Anyway, I think thrust of Lewis’s command is deeply true: Criticism without creation sours the soul.

The healthiest critics—and Lewis included himself—are creators first. They write books, not just about books. They engage the world of ideas as participants, not merely as observers.

I think we’ve lost this, especially in an era when we feel compelled to offer our ‘hot’ takes about anything and everything all the time, just so people know where we stand.

Hard truth time: most people don’t care what you think about [FILL IN THE BLANK]. Sorry, it’s true. So, why are you constantly posting takes into the void?

This is particularly true on platforms like X, where the incentive structure rewards quick, biting responses over thoughtful engagement. It’s way easier to quote tweet with a snarky comment than to write something substantive. But this routine of constant criticism without corresponding creation doesn’t just make us less generous critics; rather, it makes us smaller people.

Don’t hear me wrong: the point isn’t that criticism is beneath us, but if criticism is all we do, it’s hard to be generous. Creation softens us because it reminds us how hard it is to do anything well.

So, before you set out to critique someone else’s trellis, try putting up your own first. This goes for writing and theology and ideas and politics and, well, if you think it applies, it probably does.

As a bonus, Lewis cautioned elsewhere (On Science Fiction), “Do not criticize what you have no taste for without great caution. And above all, do not ever criticize what you simply can’t stand.” If you can’t stand something, your judgment is already compromised, and the wisest move is to simply remain silent long enough to cool off and understand your reaction.

“Even a fool who keeps silent is considered wise” (Proverb 17:28).

In time, people will notice what you affirm more than what you condemn so that your loves will speak louder than your loathings.

Rule #3: Good Reviews Include the Formal Cause and Efficient Cause

When a reviewer says, “this book is bad,” most often they mean that it didn’t suit them. But Lewis says that’s not enough. A good critic will do what he did with bad beer. He may say “it is tepid, sour, cloudy, and weak”—that’s the Formal Cause. But to say why it’s bad—why it turned out that way—requires expertise. That’s the Efficient Cause. He’d need a brewer or publican [i.e., a pub manager] “to know how beer should be brewed and kept and handled.”

In other words, don’t simply explain how a book ‘tastes’ bad unless you can also explain why it does, and the same for ‘good’ books. If you don’t know the mechanics of what the author was trying to do—historical theology, narrative biography, source criticism—then you’re not in a position to diagnose why it faltered.

In common parlance: Stay in your lane. This is especially true on social media, when one’s “impressive breadth” of expertise can range from economist to virologist to military strategist all in one day.

But if you know the field, speak with clarity and charity. Critics who can name both the formal and efficient causes of a book’s success or failure are rare, but they’re definitly the ones worth reading.

Rule #4: Find the Meaning and Intention, Not Merely the Thesis

Let’s be honest: it’s relatively easy to summarize a book, assuming you’ve actually read it. (Lewis reserves some of his sharpest scorn for reviewers who haven’t.) But it’s harder—and far more valuable—to discern what a book means.

Lewis draws a careful line between two things: the intention of the author and the meaning of the book. In Lewis’s words, “It is the author who intends; the book means.”

This distinction is a corrective to critics who reduce books to either (a) what the author says about their own work, or worse, (b) what the critic thinks the author was ‘really’ trying to say. Lewis practically giggled at critics who were convinced the One Ring to Rule Them All in Lord of the Rings was the atomic bomb. “Trust me,” Lewis said, “I was there with the rest of the Inklings. That’s not what Tolkien had in mind.”

Anyway, here’s the key: intention is what the author was aiming for. The meaning is what the book actually does to readers—what it evokes, what it shapes, what it assumes, what it delivers. A good review names both, and does so without fictionalizing either.

To that end, don’t mistake the author for the book. A book isn’t a diary or a personality test. It’s a crafted thing, an independent object with its own integrity. You don’t judge a cathedral by speculating about the architect’s personal issues; rather, you walk into it and ask, “What’s it like to be in here?” In a same way, we ought to let a book define the terms of its own success before we impose our own. (That’s, like, Rule 4.1, I guess.)

This means resisting the temptation to say things like, “What the author meant to say was…” unless you have real, documented evidence. Otherwise, you’re just performing literary ventriloquism or intellectual scholarsplaining (or whatever). Stick to what the book says.

But also attend to what it does. Try to capture its voice, its movement, its emotions. Did it feel expansive or claustrophobic? Was it generous? Defensive? Ironic? None of those things? Did it carry you or push you? Did it whisper, shout, wander, build? These textures are the real stuff of meaning.

So, for example, I’m in Mormon studies, and there’s a giant that walks among us: Rough Stone Rolling by Richard Lyman Bushman. Bushman, who is a Latter-day Saint, intended to write a biography of Joseph Smith that was neither a whitewashed hagiography nor a skeptic-appealing hit piece. But the meaning of the book—what it communicates, what it makes readers feel and reckon with—is encoded in the image of the “rough stone rolling.” That’s not just a title; rather, it’s a thesis in metaphor, one that echoes through the whole reading experience. Joseph Smith, according to Bushman, was a motioned-man, unfinished and complicated and even destructive, for better or worse.

Can you name a book’s meaning in a way the author would recognize, even if they disagree with your judgment? That’s the mark of a thoughtful critic.

And here’s one more test, borrowed from Lewis himself: Can you help the reader understand what it would be like to read the book? Not just what you thought about it, but what it felt like to sit with it and walk through it and be shaped (or resisted) by it? If you can do that—if you can re-present the book faithfully, with clarity and sympathy—then your review has done something rare.

In short, Lewis says, the goal isn’t to conquer the book; rather, it’s to understand it, even if you don’t like what you understand.

Go Forth And Critique

Alright, there’s four of what I’m calling Lewis’s Rules for Criticism. Even if you are not a reviewer, I hope you can glean some wisdom as a participant in social media. The last thing you should want to ‘create’ is snark from the sidelines.

Good criticism is more art than destruction, more re-creating than demolition. It requires humility, patience, and the kind of attentiveness that creation itself demands. “Do unto others,” if I’m not mistaken. In this case, that means remembering that behind every book is someone who cared enough to try.

If I can write this upcoming review with even a trace of that spirit, I’ll count it a success.

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📘 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.

Note: This essay begins with a stylized retelling of Isaiah’s vision.

“Ariel” was in trouble.

The city’s walls were buttressed by siege works, food and water were running low. Jerusalem’s enemy had her in a chokehold.

They would, anyway… in the near future. It wasn’t really Isaiah’s place to speculate when, exactly. His job was to warn the people.

But, unfortunately, no one seemed to care.

Feasts came and went, month after month, like clockwork. The people offered sacrifices, prayed to God, followed Torah. Not because they truly cared; religion was just an insurance policy. They thought if they could impress God enough with their performance, he’d save them (if it came down to that).

That turned out not to be the case.

Isaiah had seen Jerusalem’s destruction in a vision. So why didn’t they see what he saw?

The ancient prophet’s answer was simple:

“For the Lord hath poured out upon you the spirit of deep sleep, and hath closed your eyes: the prophets and your rulers, the seers hath he covered” (Isaiah 29:10).

Even if the people wanted to open their eyes and see God’s judgment coming, they couldn’t.

Isaiah likened the vision of Jerusalem’s imminent destruction to “the words of a book that is sealed” (Isaiah 29:11).

“Read this,” said the prophet, gesturing toward the sealed vision.

A man in fine robes stood before Isaiah, the kind of guy you could tell was intelligent. The man took the book. He studied the outside, circled the wax seal beneath his thumb... then handed it back.

“I can’t,” he said. “It’s sealed” (see Isaiah 29:11).

Isaiah turned, and found another man. This one in coarse linen, hands worn from manual labor. The prophet held out the book.

“Read this, please.”

“I can’t even read,” the man shrugged without taking it (see Isaiah 29:12).

The metaphor was clear enough. The prophets—the fine-robed guy—were the ones who should have seen, but couldn’t, because God had closed their eyes. And the seers—the illiterate guy—were the ones who couldn’t even read to begin with, because God had covered their heads.

No one could see the judgment coming.

Centuries later, in western New York, a young man named Joseph Smith sits reading these very words. As his eyes move across the familiar passage, something stirs his imagination. The ancient scene shifts: the book, the scholar, the unlearned man. They’re all reimagined in modern roles.

“‘I cannot read a sealed book,’” repeats Joseph, closing the Bible in his lap as his eyes drift to the man sitting near him. “Is that really what the professor said?”

“That’s precisely what he said,” answers Martin Harris.

Joseph’s eyes drift to a cloth-draped bundle on the table nearby. It’s 1828, and the two men sit quietly in the room where Joseph will soon begin dictating what would become Mormon scripture. In just a few months, they’ll have 116 pages completed.

But, according to Harris, Professor Charles Anthon couldn’t make out a single character.

In Joseph’s mind, Isaiah’s prophecy had truly come to pass. Just as before, the sealed book was delivered to a learned man (a trained linguist) who couldn’t read it, “for it is sealed” (Isaiah 29:11). But unlike “him that is not learned” (Isaiah 29:12), Joseph, untrained and uneducated, was translating by “the gift and power of God.”

Years later, Joseph couldn’t help but see himself in this passage:

“I commenced translating the characters and thus the Propicy of Isiaah was fulfilled which is writen in the 29 chaptr concerning the [sealed] book.”1

In his hands, Isaiah’s warning to ancient Jerusalem became something more: a prediction of a sealed book, a learned man, and an unlearned prophet in New York.

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The Scholar and the Scribe

The story of the Mormonism’s gold plates has always fascinated me. According to Joseph, there were, for centuries, ancient records of God’s people in the Americas lying dormant in a hill in rural New York. Then, on September 22, 1827, he unearthed them with the help of an angel. Over the course of two and a half years, Joseph claimed to have translated the text in fits and starts, finally publishing it in March 1830 as the Book of Mormon.

Joseph claimed to translate the plates by the ‘gift and power of God,’ but early on, he also made attempts to understand and replicate the strange etchings himself, a language he called “reformed Egyptian.” Having barely studied his own native English, he thought it best for a linguistics expert to at least validate the authenticity of the characters on the plates, even if experts couldn’t translate it. So, he transcribed a small set of characters and entrusted the document—titled “Caractors”2—to his benefactor-scribe, Martin Harris, who traveled to New York City in search of Professor Charles Anthon, “a promising young classicist” who had been teaching Greek and Latin since 1820.3

What happened next depends on who you ask.

According to Harris, Anthon examined the characters and affirmed their authenticity: the text was written in “Egyptian, Chaldeak, Assyriac, and Arabac.”4 Anthon even gave Harris a written certificate validating them. But when Harris explained the origin of the plates—about how an angel delivered them to an barely-schooled farmboy—Anthon tore up the certificate and declared it all a fraudulent ruse. He offered to translate the plates himself if Harris could bring them to him, but Harris replied that part of the plates were sealed. At that point, Anthon allegedly said, “I cannot read a sealed book.”

*cue Isaiah 29*

Harris’s account was later canonized in LDS scripture (Joseph Smith—History 1:63–65), and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints naturally favors it, portraying Anthon as the scholar who “certifie[d] characters and translation from plates.”5

But according to Anthon, Harris’s story was “perfectly false.”6 The professor claimed he was approached by Harris with a sheet of gibberish—“Greek and Hebrew letters, crosses and flourishes, Roman letters inverted or placed sideways.”7 Anthon even saw what he thought was a “Mexican Calendar” from an 1814 textbook.8

Anthon’s comment led scholar Sonia Hazard to wonder whether the plates were real, but taken from printing plates etched with a medley of reversed letters, symbols, and illustrations such as stars, half-moons, and concentric circles, which resemble characters from copper or stereotype plates used for early 19th-century printing presses.9

At any rate, Anthon feared it was “all a trick, perhaps a hoax,” and warned Harris he was being duped.10 Anthon vehemently denied giving any kind of written approval. Elsewhere, however, Anthon convoluted his testimony by admitting that, when asked for his written opinion, he “did so without any hesitation,” offering what he believed to be an authoritative debunking.11 The characters were, in the professor’s opinion, meaningless “imitation of various alphabetic characters.”12 So, depending on who you trust, Anthon both did and did not write something down about the ‘Caractors.’

(Schrödinger’s cat would like a word.)

What really happened? We’ll never know for sure. If I had to guess: Anthon was mildly intrigued, gave a cautious “maybe,” and years later, once Mormonism took off, distanced himself to avoid professional embarrassment. In any case, Harris clearly did meet with Anthon, showed him the “Caractors” document (or something like it), and received a mixed response.

Naturally, most researchers are drawn to the oddities and contradictions in this story, but I find it far more interesting to consider how Joseph Smith approached existing scripture to explain and frame his own production of new scripture, i.e., Isaiah 29.

To Joseph, the meaning was obvious: only the unlearned could read what the learned couldn’t. Isaiah had foretold it. The sealed book passed by the scholar and (in Joseph’s view) landed in the hands of the farm boy. It wasn’t a coincidence, because Joseph saw a divine pattern, one in which ancient prophecy pointed forward to his own role. For him, the Bible wasn’t a record of what God had done; rather, it was a revelation of what God was doing.

I don’t think that’s the case, though.

Isaiah 29 on Its Own Terms

If Joseph was wrong about Isaiah 29, it wasn’t for lack of imagination.

Isaiah had described a book delivered to the learned and the unlearned, who were challenged to read it. “I cannot,” said one of them, “for it is sealed.” The other said, “I cannot, for I am not learned” (Isaiah 29:11–12). Joseph read that and saw Martin Harris and Charles Anthon and himself.

But what happens when we juxtapose Joseph’s interpretation against the text and context of Isaiah 29?

In its original context, the passage is prophetic judgment against Jerusalem, and then against her enemies. The chapter opens with a cry of “woe” to Ariel (v. 1), a nickname for Jerusalem meaning “Lioness of God.” The city had been faithful in form but not in heart. Her people offered sacrifices and celebrated feasts “year to year” (v. 1), but God wasn’t impressed. Instead, He planned to lay siege to them (v. 3). Their religion had become a performance, and their lifestyles showed it.

So judgment was coming.

Then comes the turn that sparked Joseph’s imagination:

“For the Lord has poured out upon you a spirit of deep sleep, and has closed your eyes, the prophets; and your heads, the seers, he has covered. And the vision of all this has become to you like the words of a book that is sealed…” (vv. 29:10–11a)

The point isn’t that someone will eventually break the seal; rather, it’s that no one in Jerusalem can, because God Himself has sealed it as an act of judgment. Their spiritual leaders were asleep. Their eyes were shut. They couldn’t read not because they lacked literacy; it was humility they lacked.

They drew near with their lips, but their hearts were far from God (v. 13).

Isaiah 29 is a prophetic rebuke, one meant to expose Israel’s spiritual blindness and to prepare for a redemptive act of God that would be so far-reaching and wholly of His own doing that it could only be called a miracle, i.e., the messianic mission (see Isaiah 29:13–14; cf. Matthew 15:7–9).

So, what follows the rebuke in Isaiah 29 is God’s gracious response: hope for a miraclous future work of God. He will do “a marvelous work and a wonder” (v. 14), which Christians throughout the ages have interpreted as the first incarnation, God sending His Son. Through His Messiah, God would overturn human wisdom, humble the proud, and rescue sinners (see Isaiah 66:2). This is exactly how the apostle Paul understood the passage: “For it is written, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart’” (1 Corinthians 1:19; cf. Isaiah 29:14). The marvelous work is Christ crucified, i.e., the foolishness of the cross that exposes the limits of human wisdom and opens the eyes of the blind, both literally and spiritually (see Isaiah 35:5–6; 42:7; John 9:1–7; 1 Corinthians 1:18).

The passage, as it stands, leaves very little room to assume a far-futured prophet could read a sealed book. It’s about judgement with messianic hope. So, to read Isaiah 29 as a prediction of the Anthon episode is to miss the messianic redemption plot—ironically, the very thing the Book of Mormon claims to reveal.

That raises the question: Why did Joseph see himself in this passage?

I sincerely believe that early in his life Joseph was a serious student of the scriptures, raised in a Bible-saturated society and in a Bible-reading family. He was someone who genuinely believed scripture “contained the word of God.”13 So why, in 1828, did he break from traditional Christians modes of interpretation—from seeing Isaiah’s rebuke against Israel’s spiritual blindness—and instead imagining it as a cryptic endorsement of his prophetic mission?

The answer reveals something central about Joseph’s way of reading the Bible: he wasn’t reading as an exegete, like nearly all other Christians. He was reading as a seer, whether you believe him or not.

The Bible wasn’t a closed book of past fulfillment to Joseph; rather, it was more an open template for present revelation. So, to Joseph, Isaiah’s words pointed readers to the present day New York, not ancient Judah.

Like a prophet of old, Joseph looked into the pages of scripture and found a mirror, one that reflected his own story. The Book of Mormon was his “sealed book.” Martin Harris was the unlearned bearer. Charles Anthon was the wise man confounded.

It all fits together, if you squint hard enough. But if you read Isaiah on Isaiah’s terms, it doesn’t hold. Perhaps that’s the real marvel—Joseph’s remarkable interpretive leap. In retrofitting divine judgment as divine endorsement, he reshaped rebuke into revelation.

And that’s a pattern we see over and over in Joseph’s career: the Bible was less a fixed prescription for the Christian faith as it was a template to be restored. Joseph read himself into the story, reframed judgment as vindication, and repurposed ancient voices to narrate a new theology.

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📘 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.

Lee eventually backed down.

Presently, in Utah alone, about 37.4 million acres (~68%) are federally managed. For perspective, that’s a chunk of Utah roughly the size of Florida.

Much of that land is open to the public, like the many national parks. Other land is closed for military use, like the Dugway Proving Ground (itself the size of Rhode Island).

Why does the federal government own so much of Utah? you might wonder.

The answer, as with much in Utah, is tied to its Mormon roots.

The Dream of Deseret

In 1849, the Latter-day Saints asked Congress to recognize a new state they called “Deseret.” It would have been the 31st in the Union, but after Congress said “no,” California beat them to it in 1850. Meanwhile, Utah—the much smaller slice of what Deseret once claimed—wouldn’t become a state for another four decades (1896).

“Deseret,” a Book of Mormon term meaning “honeybee,” reflected how the Saints saw themselves: industrious and cooperative, working together to build a new society in what most Americans saw as an unforgiving, God-forsaken desert. (Of course, this perception belonged to the Euro-American settler type used to the lush forest in the east; to the indigenous, like the Utes and Paiutes and Shoshone, the land was anything but desolate.)

Anyway, the Mormons had begun settling the Great Basin just a few years earlier, fleeing persecution in Illinois and Missouri. When Brigham Young first entered the Salt Lake Valley in July 1847, he reportedly declared, “This is the place,” and directed waves of colonization throughout the area. With irrigation and communal labor, they turned desert into farmland and called it home.

But for the federal government, the place may have been Utah, but it wasn’t theirs. Not politically, not legally, and certainly not in the way the Saints envisioned.

So when Church leaders pushed for statehood, Congress balked. A Mormon-led state, stretching from the Rockies to the Pacific, would have split the continent and given the LDS Church enormous regional power. The Saints’ practice of polygamy didn’t help either. For many in Congress, it confirmed suspicions that Deseret would be a theocracy, not a state.

Deseret was denied and the dream of the Mormon state died.

Here’s a map I made of what the Mormons proposed, based on the same 1848 Charles Preuss map LDS leaders likely used to draw its boundaries (now housed in the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection).

They followed watershed boundaries. If it didn’t drain to the Columbia or the Gulf, it was Deseret. They included San Diego to secure a Pacific port and tried to split the Sierra Nevadas, giving Saints access to the gold rush—and gold-rushers access to Mormon supply chains.

Fun fact: there are only three straight lines. Two are in the southwest corner, which most folks know about, but can you find the third? (You’ll probably need the hi-res version to find it. See below.)

The result? A state that looks like someone tried to draw France from memory. But behind the odd shape was a serious vision: a self-governed Mormon commonwealth stretching across the West.

Until Congress denied it.

Download a hi-res version [here]. (Feel free to use it, just please give credit. It took my a long time to make.)

Why does all this matter now?

Because the land still tells the story. After rejecting Deseret, the federal government established a military fort near Salt Lake City (Fort Douglas, 1862). While officially intended to protect overland mail routes during the Civil War, its strategic positioning also served as a visible federal presence in the Mormon heartland. The also government eventually built the capitol on a hill high above the Salt Lake Temple (completed 1916). Whether symbolic or simply practical, the message was clear enough.

Washington was in charge.

Of course, federal retention of western lands also reflected broader 19th-century policies regarding territorial development, resource management, and the challenges of governing sparsely populated regions. But the pattern in Utah is hard to ignore: delayed statehood, strategic military positioning, and extensive land retention all worked to limit Mormon autonomy.

So, more than a century on, when Senator Mike Lee proposed selling off land, the controversy tapped into more than partisan land policy. Behind the politics is a deeper, older story about the unrealized legacy of Deseret.

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.

Confession time: I hadn’t ever planned on watching The Chosen.

Truth is, I’d never heard of the show until an Latter-day Saint (or ‘Mormon’) acquaintance mentioned it in passing. “Oh, you’d love it,” he insisted. I nodded politely and promptly forgot about it. I don’t watch much television, and I was vaguely aware there were controversies swirling around some Jesus series.

That was enough to keep it off my radar.

Then came that one time I met the show’s director, Dallas Jenkins, at an event in Utah. Still, that didn’t change my mind. I’d seen the first episode of the first season and a few snippets out of polite obligation before meeting Dallas. He seemed like a nice enough guy, passionate about his work, but I had books to read, papers and sermons to write. TV Jesus could wait.

But the recommendations multiplied. A close friend. A family member. Each conversation carried the earnest, “You really need to watch this.”

It was actually a pastoral counseling session that finally broke through my resistance. A congregant, eyes reddened, confided something I never thought I’d hear: “I don’t think I really believed in Jesus until I watched The Chosen.”

What?

That’s when I knew I had to watch it.

I’m all caught up now.

My conclusion? I can see exactly why this show has attracted both the admiration and the angst it has.

The Return of the Icon Wars

The Chosen has drawn praise from across denominational lines, but it hasn’t escaped controversy, especially among evangelicals. Some raise concerns about its behind-the-scenes ties, such as its production relationship with Angel Studios, a company with deep roots in Latter-day Saint circles. Others point to a pride flag spotted on set and worry about doctrinal drift. But underneath all these debates lies a deeper unease, one that has stirred Christians for centuries: Should anyone portray Jesus Christ at all?

That’s the real fault line. The concern isn’t just about the show’s dialogue or artistic choices. It’s about mere human embodiment of the divine incarnation. Can any actor—no matter how sincere, no matter how skillful—play the Son of God without bending the viewer’s imagination away from the Word made flesh and toward a particular face, voice, and gesture?

The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realized we’ve been here before.

In 787 AD, another controversy was tearing through the church, and it centered in Nicaea. No, not the Nicaean council of Trinitarian fame—the other Council of Nicaea. This one wasn’t debating Christ’s divinity, but whether Christians could make images of Christ at all.

The iconoclasts, as they were called, believed that any visual representation of the divine was inherently blasphemous, a violation of the second commandment against graven images. Because Jesus is truly God, to paint Christ’s face is to reduced the infinite to the finite. Carve his likeness, and you’ve committed idolatry.

But the iconodules (literally, “image-venerators”) disagreed. Since Christ became visible, he could be visibly represented. More than that, images actually helped believers connect with God, especially those who couldn’t read. Icons weren’t barriers to worship; rather, they were doorways.

Here’s what both sides agreed on: the danger was real. Even the iconodules insisted that images must serve Scripture, not compete with it. They weren’t advocating artistic free-for-all, but measured use of visual aids that pointed beyond themselves to the truth of the Gospels.

So, essentially, Nicaea II asked: Does an image of Christ draw the heart toward Him or away from Him? Does it clarify or confuse? Serve or supplement?

This debate has since raged for generations, despite being ‘officially’ settled in the seventh ecumenical council (the iconodules won). Still, later rulers destroyed countless works of art. Monks died defending their painted prayers. Families split over painted wood and colored glass. Iconoclasts hurled bricks through British cathedral stained glass. Yankee Puritan chapels were built as painfully plain as possible.

Sound familiar? It should.

The debates surrounding The Chosen echo that same tension. Can the sacred be made visible without being diminished? Can portrayal serve reverence or will it always risk replacing it?

I’m convinced the questions raised at Nicaea II haven’t gone away; rather, they’ve just migrated from paintings and sculptures to digital screens.

Seeing Christ: Then and Now

I’ve been particularly fascinated watching this play out especially because of the Latter-day Saint element. Here’s a faith tradition that has rarely shied away from visual theology, e.g., angel Moroni weathervane for the Nauvoo temple, astronomical symbols on the Salt Lake temple, and C.C.A. Christensen’s religious artwork. Today, you’ll find religious murals in meetinghouses, logos featuring the Christus statue, and church magazines that regularly feature artistic depictions of biblical scenes. Yet, to be frank, from my perspective it seems The Chosen, an evangelical-produced series, has stirred many Latter-day Saints in ways that even their own static art has not.

The difference, I think, is movement. And dialogue. And the terrifying intimacy of watching someone be Jesus rather than simply depict him. The Chosen makes Jesus approachable in ways centuries of religious art never quite managed, at least not to us moderns.

So, it’s a bit surreal to see how strikingly stark the reception is between Latter-day Saints and evangelicals. Many of my fellow evangelicals—especially those concerned with biblical fidelity—reject the show outright. Meanwhile, many Latter-day Saints I know have embraced it, not just as good television but as something spiritually meaningful. They talk about Jesus like they’ve read Gentle and Lowly.

Some evangelicals see this and leap to conspiracy, as if The Chosen is some crypto-Mormon plot to infiltrate evangelical circles (or, at least, it’s proof-positive that something’s afoul with BigEva). “I am the Law” was, supposedly, the smoking gun. (Hint: It’s not.)

Admittedly, as a pastor, here’s what I find actually troubling: the number of people—whether evangelical or Latter-day Saint or Roman Catholic or whatever—who seem to encounter Jesus for the first time through a television show rather than through the Gospels themselves. That’s not The Chosen’s fault. No, that’s an indictment of how we’ve been teaching the Bible. If people need Jonathan Roumie to make Jesus real to them, then perhaps we should ask why our exposition of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John has left Jesus feeling distant and abstract.

But that’s not the concern I’m hearing from most evangelicals, not the self-reflective kind we should be having. Rather, it’s the “The Chosen is a Trojan horse” argument because ‘Mormons’ like it. I think this is foolish. To assume that shared appreciation of The Chosen between evangelicals and Latter-day Saints equals theological alignment is a category error. The Gospels stand on their own, and they often portray outsiders—women, centurions, Samaritans—recognizing Christ. We shouldn’t be surprised if others resonate with this portrayal of Jesus, even if their own Christology diverts from traditional orthodoxy, e.g., Mormonism’s aversion to things like Trinitarianism, Christ’s homoousion nature, and theotokos. Let’s not confuse doctrinal purity with evangelistic sterility.

What I see is perhaps much simpler and far more powerful. I see the Lord using this show to introduce all viewers to a Jesus who is “gentle and lowly in heart” (Matthew 11:29). Not as a caricature, but as a living, moving, speaking presence who heals and touches and weeps and loves.

Yes, people can and should encounter that Jesus in the Gospels first and foremost. That’s where He’s revealed most clearly, not to mention most inspiredly, infallibly, and inerrantly. I’ll triple-down here, just to avoid being misunderstood: I believe only the Bible is God-breathed (see 2 Timothy 3:16), and only in the Bible do we have Christ’s words without error (see John 17:17). So, to be crystal clear, I’m not arguing that Scripture is the only place someone can begin to encounter Jesus; rather, it’s the only place we can be confident we are encountering Him as He truly is.

But if merely reading the Gospels were always sufficient, we wouldn’t need to exegete them. We wouldn’t gather weekly to sit under exposition. We wouldn’t write commentaries, lead small groups, or train pastors to teach the Word with clarity and conviction.

The concern that The Chosen might “replace” the Gospels misunderstands how evangelical Christianity has always operated. We’ve never claimed that Scripture needs no explanation, no illustration, no imagination, only that it needs no addition (i.e., sola Scriptura). There’s a difference. Good presentations of the Gospel don’t add to the Word of God in an authoritative sense. Every evangelical preacher risks “adding” to the Gospel the moment they provide context. But “adding” and “illuminating” are not the same thing. Rather, good portrayals of the Gospels open their message to the hearer. The best preaching, for example, gives the Gospels shape, tone, and application.

So does good art, when rightly ordered under the authority of God’s Word. And this is where The Chosen fits—not above Scripture, not beside it, but beneath it, as a subordinate work of Christian imagination. It’s also where The Chosen gives its audience the responsibility to be a Berean and ‘see if these things are not so’ in the show by searching the Scriptures.

As Nicaea II shows us, if God is invisible (see 1 Timothy 1:17), and no one has seen the Father (see John 1:18), then Christ is the visible image of the invisible God (see Colossians 1:15), the Word made flesh who dwelt among us (see John 1:14). His incarnation invites us to imagine—not invent, but imagine—the Son of God not only as transcendent but immanent. Not just as glory in heaven but as a man with dirt on his feet.

In that sense, a physical depiction of Jesus is not an attempt to limit the divine, but to acknowledge that the divine willingly limited Himself for our sake. The Chosen, then, is not a new gospel or even a supplement to the old. To his great credit, Dallas has been extremely clear on this point. Rather, it’s an imagination-stirring reflection on what it might have felt like when “Jesus wept,” when He touched the leper, when He let the little children come to Him (my favorite episode).

That reflection, however, must remain subordinate to the Bible and never function as a theological lens in its own right. Its value lies not in what it reveals, but in how it stirs us to return to what has already been revealed.

So, the question is whether those imaginative portrayals of Christ help anyone hear the Word more clearly.

Word and Image in Reformation Thought

The Reformers, too, understood this tension. Martin Luther strongly warned against idolatry, but he believed it was primarily a matter of the heart, not the eyes. “When they [images] are no longer in the heart,” he wrote, “they can do no harm when seen with the eyes” (LW 40:84). He permitted crucifixes and paintings of Christ as long as they were not adored. For him, images could instruct, comfort, and help the faithful (especially for the illiterate) so long as they did not become objects of misplaced trust.

John Calvin, by contrast, was more cautious. He argued that any depiction of Christ violated the Second Commandment. Even the Incarnation, he believed, did not legitimize human representations of Jesus because to represent Christ’s glorified body was to confine the divine. For Calvin, even sincere attempts to picture Christ risked distorting Him.

In my opinion, this places Calvin out-of-step with Nicaea II, and is, perhaps, why the most vehement criticism from The Chosen comes from Calvinistic evangelicals, especially Reformed Baptists. I’m not trying to throw shade. I’m a huge fan of Calvin and consult him often, but it’s ok to disagree with him every once in a while.

Anyway, here’s where both men agreed—idolatry is not ultimately about visible things; rather, it’s about invisible desires. A painting is not an idol until a heart makes it one (see Ezekiel 14:3). Even in Exodus 32, the golden calf wasn’t an idol because it was gold; it was an idol because Israel trusted it. As Paul puts it, “we walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7), but that’s not a ban on seeing. No, it’s a warning against replacing faith with sight.

So, Should We Watch?

For me, then, the question isn’t whether it’s right or not for The Chosen to depict Jesus. The question is whether it replaces Him, distorts Him, or draws hearts toward or away from the Jesus of the Bible. That’s the Lutheran logic worth retrieving.

We should be cautious, absolutely. But we should also be consistent. If we reject every dramatized or imaginative engagement with the Gospels on the grounds that ‘the text should be enough,’ we’ll need to carry that logic a lot further than we probably want. So long, C.S. Lewis and The Jesus Storybook Bible. Goodbye, commentaries. Farewell, expository sermons. While we’re at it, toss out missionary storytelling and Sunday School flannelgraphs, too. What’s left is a kind of bare-bones hermeneutic dressed up as faithfulness, but it’s not how the church has historically treated the Word. The standard isn’t “Did this dramatize?” The standard is: “Does this clarify Christ, or obscure Him?”

We should, of course, prefer the page to the screen 100% of the time. The Chosen is no substitute for the Gospels. And you should be cautious about creative portrayals. That’s wise. But let’s not pretend that caution is the same thing as maturity, or that reverence for the text demands rejection of every effort to help others feel what that text reveals. Because at some point, this skepticism starts sounding less like discernment and more like a retreat into a kind of 19th-century common-sense rationalist Biblicism that fears anything outside black ink and white paper.

And besides, if the goal is to get people into the Gospels, The Chosen has shown to be a pretty effective on-ramp. There’s something compelling about the visual and audio portrayal of a messiah-carpenter with a Galilean accent saying, “Follow me.”

The Chosen isn’t perfect, but neither were the icons that survived the iconoclastic destruction. What matters is whether they serve their purpose: helping us see more clearly, love more deeply, and follow more faithfully.

No image can ever fully capture the Lord Jesus Christ, but some may cause us to look again at the One who truly saves.

From where I sit, The Chosen is doing exactly that. I don’t particularly love the show, to be honest, but I don’t hate it either. And Dallas has been clear that his show isn’t the main act, but rather a creative finger pointing.

If it’s pointing to Jesus—and pointing clearly—then I say, let it point.