Main Page: Anti-Mormonism 101
An Obligatory Page About the CES Letter
"I love it when random people comment in threads where the finer points of LDS doctrine is being discussed and just leave a link to the CES Letter and disappear. I imagine they feel like bomber pilots, dropping a nuke and getting out of there, imagining the devastation they're leaving in their wake.... Generally, people just chuckle at the interruption, perhaps comment on how pitiful the CES Letter is and how sad it is that anyone finds it convincing, and then continue their discussion." - Eirik Scoville
The "Letter to a CES Director", later renamed the "CES Letter" because five words takes too long for lazy people to write, has received far more attention than it deserves, to the point that I've caved and decided to give it some more. I'm going to focus on the little-known story of how it came to be, rather than a specific rebuttal, though I'll link to a few of those toward the end. To recap, in 2012 a Latter-day Saint named Jeremy Runnells encountered controversial information about Church history on the internet, felt betrayed and lied to because he hadn't learned these things while growing up in the Church, and lost his testimony. It appears that his testimony was prone to such damage in large part because it depended on several peurile fundamentalist assumptions about what the Church and the gospel were supposed to be, and I don't say that to be derogatory. I had a similar worldview before my own first faith crisis and had to change it substantially when I encountered information that didn't fit in it. I can absolutely relate to the feeling of betrayal, too.
Scholar Patrick Mason observed, "The letter is nearly a perfect inverse of the version of Mormonism it is reacting to. Jeremy Runnels may have written the letter, but it was actually an inevitability - someone, sometime, somewhere was going to write that letter, because it was the obvious response to a certain style, tone, and mode of Mormonism that culminated in the highly doctrinaire, no-retreat-no-surrender positions taken by certain church leaders and members especially in the second half of the twentieth century. I would actually agree with the CES letter's basic notion, that the Mormonism it is responding to is unsustainable. Where I disagree is that I don't think the Mormonism it is responding to is actually the real, only, or inevitable Mormonism. Certainly, that was some people's Mormonism, but it's not my Mormonism, and I don't think it's the Mormonism that is going to endure in future decades and centuries."
However sympathetic and understandable his initial struggles may have been, subsequent events indicate that Jeremy Runnells quickly made the transition into full-on hostility toward his former religion. Late that same year he posted a mocking and sarcastic "Open Letter to Elder Quentin L. Cook", which he now never mentions, on an ex-Mormon forum under the pseudonym "Kolobot". Publicly, he pretended to still be seeking answers and resolutions to his concerns. A CES (Church Education System) director who knew his grandfather inquired about what these concerns were, so he compiled a letter that purported to be exactly those. In reality, he crowdsourced much of this material from the ex-Mormon subreddit and didn't bother to actually read the sources he was given or represent their claims accurately.
Six months after his first letter and under his real name this time, Jeremy Runnells posted "Letter to a CES Director" on the internet for his posterity and all the world to read. It almost immediately drew a lot of undeserved publicity and a disturbing level of cultish adulation from the anti-Mormon community. It sparked probably tens of thousands of additional faith crises. So Jeremy Runnells did the only logical thing: he quit his job to organize the CES Letter Foundation, solicit donations and work on promoting it full time. Rumor has it he's making six figures a year from promoting his letter, but nobody knows for sure because, even though he criticizes the Church for not disclosing its finances, he doesn't disclose his finances. Most peculiar.
In early 2016, after staying in the Church despite not believing it for well over three years, Jeremy Runnells' stake leadership initiated disciplinary proceedings against him for apostasy. He chose to make into a media spectacle out of these otherwise confidential proceedings and paint himself as a martyr. In April, during his disciplinary council, he resigned his membership just before he could be excommunicated and marched outside to announce it to his fans. Now he could gloat that he was the one who had excommunicated the Church. He sure showed them, eh? His supporters protested the Church's efforts to punish him for "asking questions", because they apparently didn't understand the difference between a question and an accusation, and somehow the sarcasm and mockery throughout the CES Letter (to say nothing of his earlier letter to Elder Cook) escaped their notice. Like John Dehlin before him, the only conceivable reason for militant non-believer Jeremy Runnells to retain his membership was to increase his perceived credibility with other members. Unlike John Dehlin, however, he wasn't doing it right because most people didn't even realize he was still a member.
Like virtually all anti-Mormon material, the CES Letter has nothing new to say. Jeremy Runnells never claimed that it had anything new to say. He has pointed out that he never claimed that it had anything new to say. Unlike the Latter-day Saint scholars he holds in contempt, he has no academic credentials or experience whatsoever and the letter's level of discourse reflects this. So, why do its acolytes think it's such a big screaming deal and obsessively spam church-related discussions with links to it? I don't know, but I assume because, in a particularly egregious example of the "big list" fallacy, its author substitutes quantity for quality by compiling so many criticisms into so little space. His letter is like Jerald and Sandra Tanner's work compressed, dumbed down and secularized for the digital age. Too many people these days don't want to do real research. They don't want detail or nuance or context. They want snarky bullet points and sound bites, and the CES Letter provides as many as they could possibly want.
Even then, reading it is too much effort for some people. For example, someone called "lavaman" once posted on the Recovery from Mormonism forum requesting "a concise [anti-Mormon] book, easy to read... and you do not have [to] sift through complex arguments, difficult language, lengthy diatribe etc..." When someone called "the1v" recommended the CES Letter, lavaman said "I like cesletter - needs to be even shorter..." Around this same time the anti-Mormon site "Zelph on the Shelf" posted "The Millennial's Brief Guide to the CES Letter" which offered one-sentence summaries of fifty-three points from the letter. No danger of exposure to nuance or context there, eh? In fairness, they urged interested parties to "GO READ THE REAL THING, YOU LAZY FREAKS."
Jeremy Runnells has often protested, especially while arguing with his stake president, that all of the facts in his letter are accurate and in many cases have been vindicated by the Church's Gospel Topics essays that came out shortly afterward. Even if that were true - which it isn't, even after several revisions - he's spectacularly missing the point. The facts he chooses to include in his letter, the facts he chooses not to include, and the lens he puts in front of his facts to consistently cast the Church in the least flattering light possible, all combine to present a very deliberate viewpoint that is by no means objective or "just telling the truth". He's entitled to his viewpoint, but it's highly disingenuous for him to pretend not to understand why promoting this viewpoint and destroying people's testimonies constitutes apostasy, or that alternative viewpoints exist among people who know as much and far more about church history than he does. Every "question" he raises in his letter had been known and answered many times by 2013. He says he doesn't consider these answers satisfactory because they came from unofficial apologists and not church leadership, whom he evidently presumes have nothing else to do. But since he had already turned against the Church well before he crowdsourced his "questions" from the ex-Mormon subreddit, it's doubtful anything church leaders could say would make much of a difference anyway.
Nonetheless, there have been many specific responses to the CES Letter since it came out, sometimes going point-by-point and sometimes offering broader summaries of its many deficiencies. There's no need for me to waste my time doing something similarly thorough here. By far the best and wittiest one, in my opinion, is Jim Bennett's "A Reply from a Former CES Employee". For a while, whenever someone shared it with Jeremy Runnells on Facebook, he deleted it, blocked them, and continued to complain that no one had answered his "questions". Eventually he met with Jim Bennett in person, they became friends, and he attempted a response. A fair bit shorter but still extensive response is Michael R. Ash's "Bamboozled by the CES Letter". At almost the same length, Brian Hales provides an annotated version of the entire letter with several external links. Much shorter but still good responses include Dr. Daniel C. Peterson's "Some Reflections on That Letter to a CES Director" and Kevin Christensen's "Eye of the Beholder, Law of the Harvest: Observations on the Inevitable Consequences of the Different Investigative Approaches of Jeremy Runnells and Jeff Lindsay".
Scholar Patrick Mason observed, "The letter is nearly a perfect inverse of the version of Mormonism it is reacting to. Jeremy Runnels may have written the letter, but it was actually an inevitability - someone, sometime, somewhere was going to write that letter, because it was the obvious response to a certain style, tone, and mode of Mormonism that culminated in the highly doctrinaire, no-retreat-no-surrender positions taken by certain church leaders and members especially in the second half of the twentieth century. I would actually agree with the CES letter's basic notion, that the Mormonism it is responding to is unsustainable. Where I disagree is that I don't think the Mormonism it is responding to is actually the real, only, or inevitable Mormonism. Certainly, that was some people's Mormonism, but it's not my Mormonism, and I don't think it's the Mormonism that is going to endure in future decades and centuries."
However sympathetic and understandable his initial struggles may have been, subsequent events indicate that Jeremy Runnells quickly made the transition into full-on hostility toward his former religion. Late that same year he posted a mocking and sarcastic "Open Letter to Elder Quentin L. Cook", which he now never mentions, on an ex-Mormon forum under the pseudonym "Kolobot". Publicly, he pretended to still be seeking answers and resolutions to his concerns. A CES (Church Education System) director who knew his grandfather inquired about what these concerns were, so he compiled a letter that purported to be exactly those. In reality, he crowdsourced much of this material from the ex-Mormon subreddit and didn't bother to actually read the sources he was given or represent their claims accurately.
Six months after his first letter and under his real name this time, Jeremy Runnells posted "Letter to a CES Director" on the internet for his posterity and all the world to read. It almost immediately drew a lot of undeserved publicity and a disturbing level of cultish adulation from the anti-Mormon community. It sparked probably tens of thousands of additional faith crises. So Jeremy Runnells did the only logical thing: he quit his job to organize the CES Letter Foundation, solicit donations and work on promoting it full time. Rumor has it he's making six figures a year from promoting his letter, but nobody knows for sure because, even though he criticizes the Church for not disclosing its finances, he doesn't disclose his finances. Most peculiar.
In early 2016, after staying in the Church despite not believing it for well over three years, Jeremy Runnells' stake leadership initiated disciplinary proceedings against him for apostasy. He chose to make into a media spectacle out of these otherwise confidential proceedings and paint himself as a martyr. In April, during his disciplinary council, he resigned his membership just before he could be excommunicated and marched outside to announce it to his fans. Now he could gloat that he was the one who had excommunicated the Church. He sure showed them, eh? His supporters protested the Church's efforts to punish him for "asking questions", because they apparently didn't understand the difference between a question and an accusation, and somehow the sarcasm and mockery throughout the CES Letter (to say nothing of his earlier letter to Elder Cook) escaped their notice. Like John Dehlin before him, the only conceivable reason for militant non-believer Jeremy Runnells to retain his membership was to increase his perceived credibility with other members. Unlike John Dehlin, however, he wasn't doing it right because most people didn't even realize he was still a member.
Like virtually all anti-Mormon material, the CES Letter has nothing new to say. Jeremy Runnells never claimed that it had anything new to say. He has pointed out that he never claimed that it had anything new to say. Unlike the Latter-day Saint scholars he holds in contempt, he has no academic credentials or experience whatsoever and the letter's level of discourse reflects this. So, why do its acolytes think it's such a big screaming deal and obsessively spam church-related discussions with links to it? I don't know, but I assume because, in a particularly egregious example of the "big list" fallacy, its author substitutes quantity for quality by compiling so many criticisms into so little space. His letter is like Jerald and Sandra Tanner's work compressed, dumbed down and secularized for the digital age. Too many people these days don't want to do real research. They don't want detail or nuance or context. They want snarky bullet points and sound bites, and the CES Letter provides as many as they could possibly want.
Even then, reading it is too much effort for some people. For example, someone called "lavaman" once posted on the Recovery from Mormonism forum requesting "a concise [anti-Mormon] book, easy to read... and you do not have [to] sift through complex arguments, difficult language, lengthy diatribe etc..." When someone called "the1v" recommended the CES Letter, lavaman said "I like cesletter - needs to be even shorter..." Around this same time the anti-Mormon site "Zelph on the Shelf" posted "The Millennial's Brief Guide to the CES Letter" which offered one-sentence summaries of fifty-three points from the letter. No danger of exposure to nuance or context there, eh? In fairness, they urged interested parties to "GO READ THE REAL THING, YOU LAZY FREAKS."
Jeremy Runnells has often protested, especially while arguing with his stake president, that all of the facts in his letter are accurate and in many cases have been vindicated by the Church's Gospel Topics essays that came out shortly afterward. Even if that were true - which it isn't, even after several revisions - he's spectacularly missing the point. The facts he chooses to include in his letter, the facts he chooses not to include, and the lens he puts in front of his facts to consistently cast the Church in the least flattering light possible, all combine to present a very deliberate viewpoint that is by no means objective or "just telling the truth". He's entitled to his viewpoint, but it's highly disingenuous for him to pretend not to understand why promoting this viewpoint and destroying people's testimonies constitutes apostasy, or that alternative viewpoints exist among people who know as much and far more about church history than he does. Every "question" he raises in his letter had been known and answered many times by 2013. He says he doesn't consider these answers satisfactory because they came from unofficial apologists and not church leadership, whom he evidently presumes have nothing else to do. But since he had already turned against the Church well before he crowdsourced his "questions" from the ex-Mormon subreddit, it's doubtful anything church leaders could say would make much of a difference anyway.
Nonetheless, there have been many specific responses to the CES Letter since it came out, sometimes going point-by-point and sometimes offering broader summaries of its many deficiencies. There's no need for me to waste my time doing something similarly thorough here. By far the best and wittiest one, in my opinion, is Jim Bennett's "A Reply from a Former CES Employee". For a while, whenever someone shared it with Jeremy Runnells on Facebook, he deleted it, blocked them, and continued to complain that no one had answered his "questions". Eventually he met with Jim Bennett in person, they became friends, and he attempted a response. A fair bit shorter but still extensive response is Michael R. Ash's "Bamboozled by the CES Letter". At almost the same length, Brian Hales provides an annotated version of the entire letter with several external links. Much shorter but still good responses include Dr. Daniel C. Peterson's "Some Reflections on That Letter to a CES Director" and Kevin Christensen's "Eye of the Beholder, Law of the Harvest: Observations on the Inevitable Consequences of the Different Investigative Approaches of Jeremy Runnells and Jeff Lindsay".
Jeremy Runnells likes to play the persecution card and complain about being attacked by apologists every time someone responds to his materials. He often complains about the "lies" and "slander" against him and his character. Coming from someone who has proven his dishonesty in pretending to "ask questions" long after coming out in open hostility against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and now makes his living destroying people's faith, that's a little hard to take seriously. But I do want to share one more thing. I attended ward prayer with the Logan YSA 35th Ward several times in 2016. Each Sunday evening, we passed around a paper to write down the names of people we wanted to pray for. Every time, somebody wrote "Jeremy Runnells". I later found out that someone in that ward was his sister-in-law, so it was almost certainly her. I always found it touching. I bear no ill will against him either, but I don't appreciate what he does and I hope people can see it for what it is.
