Main Page: Anti-Mormonism 101
Anti-Mormon Lies
During the nineteenth century, it was very common for the enemies of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to spread barefaced lies. Now, of course, you can’t just make stuff up without getting called out on it, so usually critics merely take facts out of context and put the most unfavorable spin possible on them, which is still lying but allows them to insist that they’re telling the truth because the facts are “accurate”. Still, sometimes they still do say things that are flat-out untrue by any measure, apparently feeling that the ends justify the means because the Church is false and therefore anything said against it is fair game. Those who sincerely believe these lies have been very sloppy and negligent in their "research", which is what they usually accuse Latter-day Saints of. (Many critics will probably be tempted to respond with a "tu quoque" fallacy by pointing out instances where Latter-day Saint apologists or defenders have been less than honest themselves. I abhor and condemn these instances as well - I'm looking at you, Rodney Meldrum.)
Joseph Smith was a convicted con man.
For those living in anti-Mormon fantasy world where anything negative about Joseph Smith must be true, being acquitted after a pre-trial examination, where the very man he was allegedly conning (Josiah Stowell) testified in his defense, apparently qualifies him as a “convicted con man”.
Joseph Smith was the only person who saw the "gold plates".
Yes, people actually say this. despite that fact that virtually every copy of the Book of Mormon contains two affadavits signed by a total of eleven people affirming that they also saw the plates. Since these witnesses existed, and since none of them ever denied having seen the plates even when several of them became alienated from Joseph Smith and the Church of Jesus Christ, the critics who ignore them would be better off making pathetic attemps to discredit them like the others do.
Joseph Smith knew about Comoros and its capital, Moroni (assumed by several critics to be the inspiration for the Hill Cumorah and angel Moroni), from Captain Kidd stories.
Though Captain Kidd did operate in that region of the world, no extant source about him so much as mentions the word "Comoros" or "Moroni", the latter of which was a small and obscure village and didn't become the capital until 1876.
Joseph Smith was a pedophile / Joseph Smith married underage girls.
The term pedophilia generally refers to children eleven and younger, and the upper cutoff is thirteen, so marrying a fourteen year old would not make Joseph Smith a pedophile then or now. This is a brilliant example of how critics substitute ad hominem rhetoric for strength of arguments and hope no one will notice if it isn't even accurate. (By the way, "pedophile" and "child molester" are not synonymous, and most of the former are not the latter. See my page "In Defense of Pedophiles" for more information.) The girls could not possibly be "underage" when the modern legal age of consent was not in place, and, in fact, every US state still allows minors to be married under certain circumstances. Laws vary, but as of 2017 it is sometimes legal for 14 year old girls to marry in 29 states. Of course, the laws and culture of Joseph Smith's time were very different and evidence suggests that these sealings involved no sexual relations anyway.
Joseph Smith sent men on missions so he could marry their wives.
There is only one case in which this even could have arguably happened, so the ubiquitous use of plural terminology is lazy and dishonest. And in this one case, Orson Hyde had been on his mission for an entire year before Joseph Smith married his wife, and fully half of the four extant contradictory accounts claim that Orson Hyde was aware of it. In any case, there is no record of him ever having a problem with it. So this one is part dishonest and part stupid.
Brigham Young ordered the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
No, he ordered against the Mountain Meadows Massacre but his letter didn't arrive in time. That is a documented fact. Speculation that he was somehow behind it anyway or that his letter actually meant the opposite of what it said are based on thirty percent paranoia, seventy percent a priori assumption that everything Brigham Young said or did was evil, and zero percent fact.
Elder Heber C. Kimball once said, "Brethren, I want you to understand that it is not to be as it has been heretofore. The brother missionaries have been in the habit of picking out the prettiest women for themselves before they get here, and bringing on the ugly ones for us; hereafter you have to bring them all here before taking any of them, and let us all have a fair shake."
This quote originated in an anti-polygamy rant in the New York Times on April 17, 1860. The anonymously written piece claimed that "the old reprobate" had said this "[s]ome time ago" to "some missionaries... in the Tabernacle", but gave no date, transcript, or identity of whomever was allegedly there and heard him say this. The chance of it being an authentic quote is almost zero and mindlessly accepting it such is very poor scholarship.
Latter-day Saints were like the KKK.
Latter-day Saints on the whole were more or less racist during eras when Americans on the whole were more or less racist. Yet instead of comparing them to other Americans, some childish critics would rather compare them to a group that actually lynched and burned black people. In that pesky thing called reality, the Ku Klux Klan hated Latter-day Saints and the feeling was mutual, largely owing to the latter group’s antipathy toward "secret combinations". It’s doubtful that even one active Latter-day Saint was a member of the KKK or approved of their activities.
Joseph Fielding Smith removed the 1832 account of the First Vision from its letterbook and hid it in his safe for a while before putting it back in because rumors of its existence had begun circulating.
Here’s what we actually know: At some point, probably in the mid-twentieth century, someone removed the First Vision account from the book, and at some point later someone put it back in. That’s literally all we know, and yet from that, critics use their patented anti-Mormon mind reading powers to extrapolate the rest. A person might reasonably wonder why, if the Church was so concerned about keeping this hidden, Joseph Fielding Smith didn’t just destroy the account altogether, but that would require more brainpower than regurgitating criticisms.
The Church opposed civil rights legislation in Utah and/or California in 1964 and/or 1965.
This baseless accusation first appeared in a September 1965 article by Glen W. Davidson in The Christian Century. It was repeated without attribution in The Mormon Establishment by Wallace Turner, a New York Times journalist who should have known better but was too busy grinding his racial ax against the Church to concern himself too much with facts.
The priesthood ban and/or racist theories surrounding it made Latter-day Saints more prejudiced against black people or civil rights in the secular realm.
The critics, on whom the burden of proof obviously rests, have never presented any evidence of this. Latter-day Saint sociologist Armand Mauss, however, did a study in 1966 which found Latter-day Saints to be no more or less racist than the general population. Many of them - most noticeably Michigan governor George Romney - supported the civil rights movement. In a surprising reverse example of the religious/secular dichotomy, President David O. McKay was opposed to the civil rights movement but pleaded for a revelation to extend priesthood and temple blessings to black people. In 1971 a fact-finding group from the University of Arizona found, again, that BYU students were no more racist than anyone else.
Gay students at BYU in the 1970s were forced to participate in aversion therapy to change their orientation, or else be expelled. The therapy included induced vomiting and pornography.
Graduate student Max McBride and his faculty mentor Dr. Eugene Thorne conducted one small aversion therapy study at BYU during a time when as it was considered an effective treatment for homosexual feelings and many other universities were doing it to a greater extent. The study was conducted on seventeen voluntary subjects who signed a statement explaining what it would entail. They were free to leave at any time, and three of them did. There was no induced vomiting or pornography. (A Latter-day Saint psychologist named Dr. Robert Card did use pornography and worked with several more patients over a longer timespan, but his private practice in Salt Lake City was not affiliated with BYU.) McBride's final paper, Effect of Visual Stimuli in Electric Aversion Therapy, detailed the entire study, which would have been entirely pointless if the paper didn't accurately describe it. In an anthropology class at Utah State University in fall 2014, I personally witnessed a guest speaker claim that he had been forced to participate in electroshock therapy at BYU after coming out to his family. He was a fellow student in his twenties. If his claim had been true, he would have been at least in his late fifties.
Egyptologist Dee Jay Nelson was hired by the Church to translate the rediscovered Joseph Smith papyri and thereby exposed the Book of Abraham as a fraud.
Dee Jay Nelson is now so forgotten he doesn't even have a Wikipedia entry, but for twelve years he convinced thousands of people that he was the world's foremost Egyptologist when in fact he was a high school and college dropout. Amazing what you could get away with back then. He used this position to give profitable lectures and pamphlets attacking the authenticity of the Book of Abraham and sometimes the Book of Mormon, which were heavily quoted by Jerald and Sandra Tanner and other anti-Mormon writers. In 1981, Latter-day Saint Robert L. Brown published a meticulously researched book exposing his fraudulent credentials and many of his other lies. In 1982, he suddenly retired from lecturing.
A portion of the Book of Mormon manuscript was determined by experts to be in Solomon Spaulding's handwriting, lending credence to the claim that he was one of its true authors.
This was a big deal in the news in 1977. Two of the three experts determined that the manuscript portion was definitely not in Spaulding's handwriting, and one of them quit the investigation because he was fed up with the anti-Mormon "researchers" misrepresenting him. One of these, Wayne Cowdrey, falsely claimed to be a descendant of Oliver Cowdery and joined the Church for a month under false pretenses to give himself more apparent credibility. Robert L. Brown exposed these charlatans in the sequel to his book, but they were more resilient than Dee Jay Nelson, and after a few revisions to remove the more obvious lies their book Who Really Wrote the Book of Mormon? is still for sale decades later.
Many Latter-day Saints were excommunicated for disagreeing with the priesthood ban.
A whopping total of two were excommunicated over this issue, and in both cases it was beyond a mere disagreement. Douglas Wallace was excommunicated for actually ordaining a black man and making it a media event in an attempt to force the Church's hand, and Byron Marchant was excommunicated for planning a demonstration at General Conference and casting a dissenting vote against church leadership.
The Church gave the priesthood and temple blessings to black people in response to public pressure.
Revisionist history at its finest. The media scrutiny, protests, and BYU boycotts reached their peak and fizzled out at the turn of the decade, a solid eight years before the revelation. In the intervening time there were only a very few isolated incidents like the aforementioned excommunications.
The Church gave the priesthood and temple blessings to black people because the federal government was threatening to take away its tax-exempt status.
I truly marvel at how many people repeat this unsubstantiated and untrue statement as if it were an unquestionable fact. Most of the time they cite no evidence whatsoever. Occasionally someone cites a 1987 book which claims that when Bob Jones University lost its tax-exempt status for forbidding interracial dating and marriage, "Rex Lee, who had been sworn in as Solicitor General seven months before, had once represented the Mormon church when it faced a problem like Bob Jones's and, to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, he had taken himself off the case." The source cited for this claim is an alleged interview with Lee, yet there is no actual record or any other recollection of this alleged case. This one sentence is literally all they have to go off of, and usually they don't bother with even that much.
The Church gave the priesthood and temple blessings to black people in response to the [nonexistent] Civil Rights Act of 1965.
This gem was the brainchild of the late Christopher Hitchens. Similar barefaced lies about religion and its adherents form the bulk of his book God is Not Great, which of course became a bestseller.
For much more information about the priesthood ban, see Latter-day Saint Racial History.
Pretty much everything Ed Decker ever wrote.
Ed Decker's book and movie "The God Makers" are so ridiculous that other prominent critics of the Church publicly distanced themselves from him, yet there are those even today who take them seriously. In June 1989 the movie was shown on national television in Ghana and a week later the Church's missionaries were expelled and its activities outlawed for seventeen months. Unfortunately for Ed Decker, the Church continued to grow in Ghana during that time and in the decades since.
Documents discovered in the 1980s, Joseph Smith describes the angel Moroni as a flaming salamander, names his son as a successor, etc.
This particular lie, far more elaborate than most, can be solely blamed on one ex-Mormon and master forger named Mark Hofmann. Of course, since it was discredited after he blew his cover and murdered two people, no one believes it now except ex-Mormon Grant Palmer who relied heavily on the forged documents for his book "An Insider's View of Mormon Origins". The leaders of the Church, particularly Gordon B. Hinckley, are on record multiple times cautioning that they didn't know if the documents were authentic, but critics now ask rhetorically why they didn't see through the lie. Doctrine and Covenants 10:37 clearly states, "But as you cannot always judge the righteous, or as you cannot always tell the wicked from the righteous, therefore I say unto you, hold your peace until I shall see fit to make all things known unto the world concerning the matter." Discrediting the documents didn't stop the bigots in the media from using them against the Church, however, as Elder Dallin H. Oaks discussed at length.
The Church suppressed Mark Hofmann's forged documents because they were embarrassing.
Elder Dallin H. Oaks addressed this criticism and called out a certain newspaper on its dishonesty: "Despite the Church’s publication of a complete list of its acquisitions from Hofmann, the allegations of suppression continued. For example, an 11 February 1987 New York Times feature states: 'According to investigators, the church leaders purchased from Mr. Hofmann and then hid in a vault a number of 19th-century letters and other documents that cast doubt on the church’s official version of its history.' This kind of character assassination attributed to anonymous 'investigators' has been all too common throughout the media coverage of this whole event. One wonders why the New York Times would not mention in its long article that almost a year earlier the Church had published a detailed list of its Hofmann acquisitions? Is the Times’ motto still 'All the news that's fit to print,' or has it become 'All the news that fits a particular perspective'?" Regardless, this lie is still repeated in Wikipedia's article on Mark Hofmann because someone put it in a book and that apparently makes it true.
In response to inquiries about whether they use the Book of Mormon in their research, the Smithsonian Institution sends out a form letter outlining several archaeological problems with the book.
The Smithsonian Institution used to send out such a letter. Its list of "problems" was badly out of date by at least the early eighties, but more to the point, hasn't actually been included in the letter since 1998. But this hasn't stopped several websites and internet trolls from pretending otherwise. And while it is true that some Latter-day Saints decades ago erroneously believed and claimed that the Smithsonian used the Book of Mormon as an archaeological guide, the vast majority of church members have never believed or even heard anything of the sort. Critics here derive a perverse level of satisfaction from demolishing a belief that virtually nobody holds.
Utah has the highest suicide rate in the US.
This has literally never been true. Utah does have one of the highest suicide rates in the US, but it has never had the highest. It has often had a lower rate than all of the states surrounding it. It has had the highest rate of suicidal thoughts in the US, but concurrent with ranking number four in happiness - a paradox that, in the grand tradition of Latter-day Saint cover-ups, was discussed at length in the Deseret News. But accuracy doesn't matter when you're trying to make an anti-Mormon point with dead people.
The Church causes Utah's high suicide rate.
Once again, critics aren't shy about asserting this as an unquestionable fact without any corroborating evidence, and this time fall into the logical fallacy of "correlation is causation". If they actually cared about suicide victims, they would be looking into the real causes instead of exploiting them to bolster their religious bigotry. Few studies have been done on this, but one found, consistent with other studies of other religions, an inverse relationship between involvement in the Church of Jesus Christ and suicide rates. I am confident that if people bother to do more studies they will continue to find results consistent with this. And for my own non-admissible anecdotal evidence, the Church certainly protected me from suicide many times.
The Church spent tithing money in support of Proposition 8 (which amended California's constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman).
The Church as an institution did not spend a penny in support of Proposition 8, but asked its members in California to make personal donations.
The Church punished members for not supporting Proposition 8.
There was not one single instance of this happening.
In his October 2010 Conference talk, Elder Boyd K. Packer claimed that gay people could change their sexual orientation. After public backlash and pressure from other church leaders, the printed version of his talk was extensively edited to remove this claim.
Elder Packer said, "Some suppose that they were preset and cannot overcome what they feel are inborn tendencies toward the impure and unnatural. Not so! Why would our Heavenly Father do that to anyone? Remember, He is our Heavenly Father." He edited this passage to clarify its meaning after many people, including myself when I heard it at age seventeen, misunderstood it. But the fact is that he never once mentioned homosexuality or same-sex attraction specifically. That was an assumption we inserted on our own. His talk was about the general principle of resisting temptation to live gospel principles, and the only concrete example he gave, twice, was the temptation of pornography. Claiming that sexual orientation could change would have also been inconsistent with other talks he gave, dating back as far as 1978, where he indicated the opposite belief - that such tendencies would be a lifelong struggle, but that one should not succumb.
The Church spent $5 billion on the City Creek Center mall.
Here, the total cost for the entire downtown Salt Lake renovation project has been superimposed over the Church’s portion, which only cost $1.5 billion. Is that still a lot? Sure. Is it as much as $5 billion? Not really. The facts are available to anyone who cares about accuracy, so not bothering with them is a lie. I once corrected a disgruntled alleged church member who cited the $5 billion figure in the comments section at By Common Consent. He acknowledged and responded to the other points in my comment, and then continued to cite the incorrect figure elsewhere as if I hadn’t said anything. Some people just don’t care about the facts.
The Church spent tithing money on the City Creek Center mall in Salt Lake City.
Not true. It has other funds from business investments that in many cases were made several decades ago.
MormonThink is an objective site run by active Latter-day Saints.
MormonThink is and always has been a site devoted to the sole purpose of destroying faith. However, its editors and acolytes attempted to push this ridiculous "objectivity" narrative on gullible Saints for a few years until late 2012 when the managing editor, David Twede, was exposed by FairMormon president Scott Gordon and subsequently excommunicated. During this time he also had the gall to claim that he was facing church discipline for criticizing Mitt Romney, which he knew perfectly well was not true.
FutureMissionary.com aims to prepare young Latter-day Saints to deal with difficult questions and other challenges on their missions.
Shortly after President Thomas S. Monson lowered the minimum missionary age to eighteen for men and nineteen for women, this website appeared. As far as I could tell no one was stupid enough to be fooled by it, but the site admins threw integrity out the window and stuck to their story no matter how many people called them out on it. That is, until they finally admitted the obvious fact that neither of them was a believer, without bothering to explain why they should have a shred of credibility after having lied for so long. This site never became a big deal anyway and now it's basically invisible.
Kate Kelly, John Dehlin, and Jeremy Runnells were excommunicated for asking questions.
I can't believe I even need to explain something so obvious and one-sided, but since I do, I'll save some time by plagiarizing from the dictionary. Question: a sentence worded or expressed so as to elicit information. Demand: an insistent and peremptory request, made as if by right. Criticism: the expression of disapproval of someone or something based on perceived faults or mistakes. Apostasy: the abandonment or renunciation of a religious or political belief.
Joseph Smith was a convicted con man.
For those living in anti-Mormon fantasy world where anything negative about Joseph Smith must be true, being acquitted after a pre-trial examination, where the very man he was allegedly conning (Josiah Stowell) testified in his defense, apparently qualifies him as a “convicted con man”.
Joseph Smith was the only person who saw the "gold plates".
Yes, people actually say this. despite that fact that virtually every copy of the Book of Mormon contains two affadavits signed by a total of eleven people affirming that they also saw the plates. Since these witnesses existed, and since none of them ever denied having seen the plates even when several of them became alienated from Joseph Smith and the Church of Jesus Christ, the critics who ignore them would be better off making pathetic attemps to discredit them like the others do.
Joseph Smith knew about Comoros and its capital, Moroni (assumed by several critics to be the inspiration for the Hill Cumorah and angel Moroni), from Captain Kidd stories.
Though Captain Kidd did operate in that region of the world, no extant source about him so much as mentions the word "Comoros" or "Moroni", the latter of which was a small and obscure village and didn't become the capital until 1876.
Joseph Smith was a pedophile / Joseph Smith married underage girls.
The term pedophilia generally refers to children eleven and younger, and the upper cutoff is thirteen, so marrying a fourteen year old would not make Joseph Smith a pedophile then or now. This is a brilliant example of how critics substitute ad hominem rhetoric for strength of arguments and hope no one will notice if it isn't even accurate. (By the way, "pedophile" and "child molester" are not synonymous, and most of the former are not the latter. See my page "In Defense of Pedophiles" for more information.) The girls could not possibly be "underage" when the modern legal age of consent was not in place, and, in fact, every US state still allows minors to be married under certain circumstances. Laws vary, but as of 2017 it is sometimes legal for 14 year old girls to marry in 29 states. Of course, the laws and culture of Joseph Smith's time were very different and evidence suggests that these sealings involved no sexual relations anyway.
Joseph Smith sent men on missions so he could marry their wives.
There is only one case in which this even could have arguably happened, so the ubiquitous use of plural terminology is lazy and dishonest. And in this one case, Orson Hyde had been on his mission for an entire year before Joseph Smith married his wife, and fully half of the four extant contradictory accounts claim that Orson Hyde was aware of it. In any case, there is no record of him ever having a problem with it. So this one is part dishonest and part stupid.
Brigham Young ordered the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
No, he ordered against the Mountain Meadows Massacre but his letter didn't arrive in time. That is a documented fact. Speculation that he was somehow behind it anyway or that his letter actually meant the opposite of what it said are based on thirty percent paranoia, seventy percent a priori assumption that everything Brigham Young said or did was evil, and zero percent fact.
Elder Heber C. Kimball once said, "Brethren, I want you to understand that it is not to be as it has been heretofore. The brother missionaries have been in the habit of picking out the prettiest women for themselves before they get here, and bringing on the ugly ones for us; hereafter you have to bring them all here before taking any of them, and let us all have a fair shake."
This quote originated in an anti-polygamy rant in the New York Times on April 17, 1860. The anonymously written piece claimed that "the old reprobate" had said this "[s]ome time ago" to "some missionaries... in the Tabernacle", but gave no date, transcript, or identity of whomever was allegedly there and heard him say this. The chance of it being an authentic quote is almost zero and mindlessly accepting it such is very poor scholarship.
Latter-day Saints were like the KKK.
Latter-day Saints on the whole were more or less racist during eras when Americans on the whole were more or less racist. Yet instead of comparing them to other Americans, some childish critics would rather compare them to a group that actually lynched and burned black people. In that pesky thing called reality, the Ku Klux Klan hated Latter-day Saints and the feeling was mutual, largely owing to the latter group’s antipathy toward "secret combinations". It’s doubtful that even one active Latter-day Saint was a member of the KKK or approved of their activities.
Joseph Fielding Smith removed the 1832 account of the First Vision from its letterbook and hid it in his safe for a while before putting it back in because rumors of its existence had begun circulating.
Here’s what we actually know: At some point, probably in the mid-twentieth century, someone removed the First Vision account from the book, and at some point later someone put it back in. That’s literally all we know, and yet from that, critics use their patented anti-Mormon mind reading powers to extrapolate the rest. A person might reasonably wonder why, if the Church was so concerned about keeping this hidden, Joseph Fielding Smith didn’t just destroy the account altogether, but that would require more brainpower than regurgitating criticisms.
The Church opposed civil rights legislation in Utah and/or California in 1964 and/or 1965.
This baseless accusation first appeared in a September 1965 article by Glen W. Davidson in The Christian Century. It was repeated without attribution in The Mormon Establishment by Wallace Turner, a New York Times journalist who should have known better but was too busy grinding his racial ax against the Church to concern himself too much with facts.
The priesthood ban and/or racist theories surrounding it made Latter-day Saints more prejudiced against black people or civil rights in the secular realm.
The critics, on whom the burden of proof obviously rests, have never presented any evidence of this. Latter-day Saint sociologist Armand Mauss, however, did a study in 1966 which found Latter-day Saints to be no more or less racist than the general population. Many of them - most noticeably Michigan governor George Romney - supported the civil rights movement. In a surprising reverse example of the religious/secular dichotomy, President David O. McKay was opposed to the civil rights movement but pleaded for a revelation to extend priesthood and temple blessings to black people. In 1971 a fact-finding group from the University of Arizona found, again, that BYU students were no more racist than anyone else.
Gay students at BYU in the 1970s were forced to participate in aversion therapy to change their orientation, or else be expelled. The therapy included induced vomiting and pornography.
Graduate student Max McBride and his faculty mentor Dr. Eugene Thorne conducted one small aversion therapy study at BYU during a time when as it was considered an effective treatment for homosexual feelings and many other universities were doing it to a greater extent. The study was conducted on seventeen voluntary subjects who signed a statement explaining what it would entail. They were free to leave at any time, and three of them did. There was no induced vomiting or pornography. (A Latter-day Saint psychologist named Dr. Robert Card did use pornography and worked with several more patients over a longer timespan, but his private practice in Salt Lake City was not affiliated with BYU.) McBride's final paper, Effect of Visual Stimuli in Electric Aversion Therapy, detailed the entire study, which would have been entirely pointless if the paper didn't accurately describe it. In an anthropology class at Utah State University in fall 2014, I personally witnessed a guest speaker claim that he had been forced to participate in electroshock therapy at BYU after coming out to his family. He was a fellow student in his twenties. If his claim had been true, he would have been at least in his late fifties.
Egyptologist Dee Jay Nelson was hired by the Church to translate the rediscovered Joseph Smith papyri and thereby exposed the Book of Abraham as a fraud.
Dee Jay Nelson is now so forgotten he doesn't even have a Wikipedia entry, but for twelve years he convinced thousands of people that he was the world's foremost Egyptologist when in fact he was a high school and college dropout. Amazing what you could get away with back then. He used this position to give profitable lectures and pamphlets attacking the authenticity of the Book of Abraham and sometimes the Book of Mormon, which were heavily quoted by Jerald and Sandra Tanner and other anti-Mormon writers. In 1981, Latter-day Saint Robert L. Brown published a meticulously researched book exposing his fraudulent credentials and many of his other lies. In 1982, he suddenly retired from lecturing.
A portion of the Book of Mormon manuscript was determined by experts to be in Solomon Spaulding's handwriting, lending credence to the claim that he was one of its true authors.
This was a big deal in the news in 1977. Two of the three experts determined that the manuscript portion was definitely not in Spaulding's handwriting, and one of them quit the investigation because he was fed up with the anti-Mormon "researchers" misrepresenting him. One of these, Wayne Cowdrey, falsely claimed to be a descendant of Oliver Cowdery and joined the Church for a month under false pretenses to give himself more apparent credibility. Robert L. Brown exposed these charlatans in the sequel to his book, but they were more resilient than Dee Jay Nelson, and after a few revisions to remove the more obvious lies their book Who Really Wrote the Book of Mormon? is still for sale decades later.
Many Latter-day Saints were excommunicated for disagreeing with the priesthood ban.
A whopping total of two were excommunicated over this issue, and in both cases it was beyond a mere disagreement. Douglas Wallace was excommunicated for actually ordaining a black man and making it a media event in an attempt to force the Church's hand, and Byron Marchant was excommunicated for planning a demonstration at General Conference and casting a dissenting vote against church leadership.
The Church gave the priesthood and temple blessings to black people in response to public pressure.
Revisionist history at its finest. The media scrutiny, protests, and BYU boycotts reached their peak and fizzled out at the turn of the decade, a solid eight years before the revelation. In the intervening time there were only a very few isolated incidents like the aforementioned excommunications.
The Church gave the priesthood and temple blessings to black people because the federal government was threatening to take away its tax-exempt status.
I truly marvel at how many people repeat this unsubstantiated and untrue statement as if it were an unquestionable fact. Most of the time they cite no evidence whatsoever. Occasionally someone cites a 1987 book which claims that when Bob Jones University lost its tax-exempt status for forbidding interracial dating and marriage, "Rex Lee, who had been sworn in as Solicitor General seven months before, had once represented the Mormon church when it faced a problem like Bob Jones's and, to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, he had taken himself off the case." The source cited for this claim is an alleged interview with Lee, yet there is no actual record or any other recollection of this alleged case. This one sentence is literally all they have to go off of, and usually they don't bother with even that much.
The Church gave the priesthood and temple blessings to black people in response to the [nonexistent] Civil Rights Act of 1965.
This gem was the brainchild of the late Christopher Hitchens. Similar barefaced lies about religion and its adherents form the bulk of his book God is Not Great, which of course became a bestseller.
For much more information about the priesthood ban, see Latter-day Saint Racial History.
Pretty much everything Ed Decker ever wrote.
Ed Decker's book and movie "The God Makers" are so ridiculous that other prominent critics of the Church publicly distanced themselves from him, yet there are those even today who take them seriously. In June 1989 the movie was shown on national television in Ghana and a week later the Church's missionaries were expelled and its activities outlawed for seventeen months. Unfortunately for Ed Decker, the Church continued to grow in Ghana during that time and in the decades since.
Documents discovered in the 1980s, Joseph Smith describes the angel Moroni as a flaming salamander, names his son as a successor, etc.
This particular lie, far more elaborate than most, can be solely blamed on one ex-Mormon and master forger named Mark Hofmann. Of course, since it was discredited after he blew his cover and murdered two people, no one believes it now except ex-Mormon Grant Palmer who relied heavily on the forged documents for his book "An Insider's View of Mormon Origins". The leaders of the Church, particularly Gordon B. Hinckley, are on record multiple times cautioning that they didn't know if the documents were authentic, but critics now ask rhetorically why they didn't see through the lie. Doctrine and Covenants 10:37 clearly states, "But as you cannot always judge the righteous, or as you cannot always tell the wicked from the righteous, therefore I say unto you, hold your peace until I shall see fit to make all things known unto the world concerning the matter." Discrediting the documents didn't stop the bigots in the media from using them against the Church, however, as Elder Dallin H. Oaks discussed at length.
The Church suppressed Mark Hofmann's forged documents because they were embarrassing.
Elder Dallin H. Oaks addressed this criticism and called out a certain newspaper on its dishonesty: "Despite the Church’s publication of a complete list of its acquisitions from Hofmann, the allegations of suppression continued. For example, an 11 February 1987 New York Times feature states: 'According to investigators, the church leaders purchased from Mr. Hofmann and then hid in a vault a number of 19th-century letters and other documents that cast doubt on the church’s official version of its history.' This kind of character assassination attributed to anonymous 'investigators' has been all too common throughout the media coverage of this whole event. One wonders why the New York Times would not mention in its long article that almost a year earlier the Church had published a detailed list of its Hofmann acquisitions? Is the Times’ motto still 'All the news that's fit to print,' or has it become 'All the news that fits a particular perspective'?" Regardless, this lie is still repeated in Wikipedia's article on Mark Hofmann because someone put it in a book and that apparently makes it true.
In response to inquiries about whether they use the Book of Mormon in their research, the Smithsonian Institution sends out a form letter outlining several archaeological problems with the book.
The Smithsonian Institution used to send out such a letter. Its list of "problems" was badly out of date by at least the early eighties, but more to the point, hasn't actually been included in the letter since 1998. But this hasn't stopped several websites and internet trolls from pretending otherwise. And while it is true that some Latter-day Saints decades ago erroneously believed and claimed that the Smithsonian used the Book of Mormon as an archaeological guide, the vast majority of church members have never believed or even heard anything of the sort. Critics here derive a perverse level of satisfaction from demolishing a belief that virtually nobody holds.
Utah has the highest suicide rate in the US.
This has literally never been true. Utah does have one of the highest suicide rates in the US, but it has never had the highest. It has often had a lower rate than all of the states surrounding it. It has had the highest rate of suicidal thoughts in the US, but concurrent with ranking number four in happiness - a paradox that, in the grand tradition of Latter-day Saint cover-ups, was discussed at length in the Deseret News. But accuracy doesn't matter when you're trying to make an anti-Mormon point with dead people.
The Church causes Utah's high suicide rate.
Once again, critics aren't shy about asserting this as an unquestionable fact without any corroborating evidence, and this time fall into the logical fallacy of "correlation is causation". If they actually cared about suicide victims, they would be looking into the real causes instead of exploiting them to bolster their religious bigotry. Few studies have been done on this, but one found, consistent with other studies of other religions, an inverse relationship between involvement in the Church of Jesus Christ and suicide rates. I am confident that if people bother to do more studies they will continue to find results consistent with this. And for my own non-admissible anecdotal evidence, the Church certainly protected me from suicide many times.
The Church spent tithing money in support of Proposition 8 (which amended California's constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman).
The Church as an institution did not spend a penny in support of Proposition 8, but asked its members in California to make personal donations.
The Church punished members for not supporting Proposition 8.
There was not one single instance of this happening.
In his October 2010 Conference talk, Elder Boyd K. Packer claimed that gay people could change their sexual orientation. After public backlash and pressure from other church leaders, the printed version of his talk was extensively edited to remove this claim.
Elder Packer said, "Some suppose that they were preset and cannot overcome what they feel are inborn tendencies toward the impure and unnatural. Not so! Why would our Heavenly Father do that to anyone? Remember, He is our Heavenly Father." He edited this passage to clarify its meaning after many people, including myself when I heard it at age seventeen, misunderstood it. But the fact is that he never once mentioned homosexuality or same-sex attraction specifically. That was an assumption we inserted on our own. His talk was about the general principle of resisting temptation to live gospel principles, and the only concrete example he gave, twice, was the temptation of pornography. Claiming that sexual orientation could change would have also been inconsistent with other talks he gave, dating back as far as 1978, where he indicated the opposite belief - that such tendencies would be a lifelong struggle, but that one should not succumb.
The Church spent $5 billion on the City Creek Center mall.
Here, the total cost for the entire downtown Salt Lake renovation project has been superimposed over the Church’s portion, which only cost $1.5 billion. Is that still a lot? Sure. Is it as much as $5 billion? Not really. The facts are available to anyone who cares about accuracy, so not bothering with them is a lie. I once corrected a disgruntled alleged church member who cited the $5 billion figure in the comments section at By Common Consent. He acknowledged and responded to the other points in my comment, and then continued to cite the incorrect figure elsewhere as if I hadn’t said anything. Some people just don’t care about the facts.
The Church spent tithing money on the City Creek Center mall in Salt Lake City.
Not true. It has other funds from business investments that in many cases were made several decades ago.
MormonThink is an objective site run by active Latter-day Saints.
MormonThink is and always has been a site devoted to the sole purpose of destroying faith. However, its editors and acolytes attempted to push this ridiculous "objectivity" narrative on gullible Saints for a few years until late 2012 when the managing editor, David Twede, was exposed by FairMormon president Scott Gordon and subsequently excommunicated. During this time he also had the gall to claim that he was facing church discipline for criticizing Mitt Romney, which he knew perfectly well was not true.
FutureMissionary.com aims to prepare young Latter-day Saints to deal with difficult questions and other challenges on their missions.
Shortly after President Thomas S. Monson lowered the minimum missionary age to eighteen for men and nineteen for women, this website appeared. As far as I could tell no one was stupid enough to be fooled by it, but the site admins threw integrity out the window and stuck to their story no matter how many people called them out on it. That is, until they finally admitted the obvious fact that neither of them was a believer, without bothering to explain why they should have a shred of credibility after having lied for so long. This site never became a big deal anyway and now it's basically invisible.
Kate Kelly, John Dehlin, and Jeremy Runnells were excommunicated for asking questions.
I can't believe I even need to explain something so obvious and one-sided, but since I do, I'll save some time by plagiarizing from the dictionary. Question: a sentence worded or expressed so as to elicit information. Demand: an insistent and peremptory request, made as if by right. Criticism: the expression of disapproval of someone or something based on perceived faults or mistakes. Apostasy: the abandonment or renunciation of a religious or political belief.
In an ironic but not unsurprising twist, I have personally been blocked on Facebook by Mr. Dehlin for asking a question. He had posted something from an anonymous source claiming to work at church headquarters, I asked why we should trust this source, and he blocked me.
The short-lived policy change classifying same-sex couples as apostates and barring their children from baptism until age eighteen resulted in an increase of LGBT youth suicides within the Church.
First, I acknowledge that this policy caused very real pain for many church members LGBT or otherwise. But this claim was made by an activist within the Church based on anonymous reports she had allegedly received from the parents of these individuals, and repeated by others without question - even though the actual statistics showed no such increase, let alone the number she claimed, and the people who deal with these things heard nothing about the policy being a factor in those that did occur. In any case, suicides are complex and never motivated by one single factor. Politicizing them to attack an organization is immensely insensitive to the victims (the real victims, that is, not the ones that were made up).
BYU punished women for being sexually assaulted.
Several sexual assault victims at BYU were reluctant or unwilling to report their assaults because they feared being punished for Honor Code violations that could have been discovered during the investigation. After significant negative publicity in late 2016, BYU made several policy changes including granting Honor Code amnesty to sexual assault victims. While the original policies had terrible unintended consequences and were long overdue for change, they did not punish the victims for being assaulted or require them to "repent for being raped" - yet this was exactly how many critics phrased it, including an editorial that the Salt Lake Tribune should have been (but wasn't) embarrassed to publish.
Latter-day Saint scholar Richard Bushman has rejected the Church's historical truth claims.
At a fireside in late 2016, Dr. Bushman responded to a question, "I think for the church to remain strong it has to reconstruct its narrative. The dominant narrative is not true, it can't be sustained, so the church has to absorb all this new information or it will be on very shaky grounds, and that’s what its trying to do, and it’ll be a strain for a lot of people, older people especially, but I think it has to change." Critics jumped on this quote, circulated it, and either ignored or dismissed his subsequent public clarifications of his meaning. In 2020, for example, he wrote, "Over the years, my position has remained pretty constant on the question of divine origins and inspiration of the prophets. I believe pretty much the way I did when I was a missionary. I misstated my position once in a fireside that John Dehlin has made much of as if I had given up belief. I said the history as we believe it is not true, by which I actually meant not accurate. We have had to correct lots of details in the Joseph Smith period. But the fundamental thrust of that history remains the same. God was working among the people I believe and we are the heirs of that great movement."
BYU-I professor Ruthie Robertson was fired for making a private Facebook post about LGBT pride.
Ruthie Robertson was a 22-year-old adjunct faculty member (aka not a professor) who was not renewed for another semester after she made a Facebook post arguing, through logical fallacies and ignorance of scripture, that God is okay with homosexual behavior and the Church's teachings and policies are wrong and harmful. Most people would expect to be fired for publicly criticizing their employer, and recognize that "private Facebook post" is an oxymoron. Oh, and then there's the little detail that she had already apostatized from the Church and was posting on reddit as "exmofeministq". She lied to her employer, the media, and everyone else about being a faithful Latter-day Saint so that she could pull this little publicity stunt. But hey, when it comes to LGBT pride, the ends justify the means, right?
Former MTC President Joseph Bishop attempted to rape McKenna Denson (June Hughes at the time) while she was a missionary there in 1984, and decades later confessed to it on tape.
Bishop made no such confession. In the recording, he said he had a problem with sexual misconduct and asked Denson's forgiveness, but said he didn't remember any attempt to rape her. Bishop had dementia and at the time was on painkillers from surgery a few days earlier. In the recording it's very obvious that Denson took advantage of his confused mental state to direct the conversation, as happens with false confessions all the time, but even so, he did not make the confession that people claimed he made. Furthermore, Denson is a pathological liar with a record of false rape accusations and fraudulent lawsuits (not to mention other things, like soliciting donations by pretending to have cancer) going back literally to before her mission. That's why she had to change her name in the first place. When the Church's lawyers documented these facts, they were demonized for trying to smear her. When her former biggest supporter and avowed enemy of the Church Mike Norton documented these facts, he was applauded for his bravery and integrity. Her credibility disintegrated overnight and never recovered.
The books View of the Hebrews, Wonders of Nature and Providence, and Manuscript Found all contain the words "Moroni", "Mormon", "Lamanites", and "Nephites".
Christian YouTuber "It's Me Jessie" has produced some truly craptacular videos attacking The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but even she apparently realized how laughable the many Book of Mormon plagiarism hypotheses are. I can only assume that's why she tried to bolster them by pulling this claim out of her butt, and I also assume she never thought anyone would actually take her up on her suggestion to "look into" the aforementioned books. But I thought Christians weren't supposed to bear false witness?
If the Church is going to act like a business then it needs to start paying taxes.
The Church does pay taxes on its for-profit enterprises, which for legal purposes are incorporated under a separate entity. Duh.
The LD$ Church is all about money.
In fairness, that would explain why it charges admission for General Conference, devotionals, temple open houses, and pageants, and charges for its magazine subscriptions and website memberships, and has gift shops and donation buckets at temples and church history sites, and only proselytizes or invests infrastructure in prosperous parts of the world... oh wait.
The Church is in decline.
Are these people in denial or just really bad at math? While it is true that the Church has gone through a time of crisis in recent years, the people resigning have never been more than a fraction of a percent of the total membership, and even with far from perfect convert retention, the Church continues to organize stakes and build temples. Of course, there are those who claim that the new temples are just to create a "facade" of growth. Whatever. You know, you can still believe the Church is false if you acknowledge that it's growing. Refusing to do so just makes you look like an idiot.
The Church only grows in third-world countries because they don't have access to the internet.
People in West Africa had access to materials about the Church in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, and 70s, including critical ones. In 1963, the Nigerian Outlook published an angry letter from Ambrose Chukwu, a college student in California, that led to an outcry and the government refusing to issue missionary visas. In 1972, prospective Saint Anie Dick Obot received a pamphlet called "Three Reasons Not to Become a Mormon" and passed it around to the other prospective Saints. The next year, twenty-five prospective congregations led by E.E. Akpan renamed themselves "Grace and Truth Church" after reading the book Mormonism: Shadow or Reality? In 1989, "The God Makers" was shown on Ghanaian national television and a week later all missionaries were expelled and church meetings banned for eighteen months. In 2008, scam artist Darlington W. Gbee formed the now-defunct African Exmormon Foundation in Liberia to spread anti-Mormon books and DVDs, and appeared on the radio and in newspapers.
Matt Martinish of the Cumorah foundation also did an analysis, which is more than any critic has bothered to do, and found that "positive and negative influences of the internet on Latter-day Saint growth are nearly equal in strength resulting in little to no fluctuation in membership and congregational growth trends from the recent past in most countries around the world."
There is not one shred of evidence for the Book of Mormon.
It’s easier to keep repeating this and wishing it were true than to actually address the mountains of evidence that have been compiled, especially if you don’t know English very well and think that "evidence" is another word for "proof". See my page "Is There Any Evidence for the Book of Mormon"?
Latter-day Saints believe things just because other Saints/their parents/their leaders tell them to.
This one is popular among atheists who think that the billions of people who disagree with them re: the existence of deity are all just gullible and stupid. I can't speak for all Latter-day Saints, but anyone who knows anything about our religion knows that its truth claims aren't based on "because I said so". Every Latter-day Saint is familiar with the exhortation to find out for ourselves whether the Book of Mormon or anything else is true by asking God directly. It's one thing to believe, as an atheist presumably would, that the responses we receive are just our imaginations; it's another thing entirely to feign ignorance that they happen. (Granted, many Saints do this themselves in a way, by refusing to pray about doctrines or policies they disagree with, because that would require them to consider the possibility that they could be wrong.)
The short-lived policy change classifying same-sex couples as apostates and barring their children from baptism until age eighteen resulted in an increase of LGBT youth suicides within the Church.
First, I acknowledge that this policy caused very real pain for many church members LGBT or otherwise. But this claim was made by an activist within the Church based on anonymous reports she had allegedly received from the parents of these individuals, and repeated by others without question - even though the actual statistics showed no such increase, let alone the number she claimed, and the people who deal with these things heard nothing about the policy being a factor in those that did occur. In any case, suicides are complex and never motivated by one single factor. Politicizing them to attack an organization is immensely insensitive to the victims (the real victims, that is, not the ones that were made up).
BYU punished women for being sexually assaulted.
Several sexual assault victims at BYU were reluctant or unwilling to report their assaults because they feared being punished for Honor Code violations that could have been discovered during the investigation. After significant negative publicity in late 2016, BYU made several policy changes including granting Honor Code amnesty to sexual assault victims. While the original policies had terrible unintended consequences and were long overdue for change, they did not punish the victims for being assaulted or require them to "repent for being raped" - yet this was exactly how many critics phrased it, including an editorial that the Salt Lake Tribune should have been (but wasn't) embarrassed to publish.
Latter-day Saint scholar Richard Bushman has rejected the Church's historical truth claims.
At a fireside in late 2016, Dr. Bushman responded to a question, "I think for the church to remain strong it has to reconstruct its narrative. The dominant narrative is not true, it can't be sustained, so the church has to absorb all this new information or it will be on very shaky grounds, and that’s what its trying to do, and it’ll be a strain for a lot of people, older people especially, but I think it has to change." Critics jumped on this quote, circulated it, and either ignored or dismissed his subsequent public clarifications of his meaning. In 2020, for example, he wrote, "Over the years, my position has remained pretty constant on the question of divine origins and inspiration of the prophets. I believe pretty much the way I did when I was a missionary. I misstated my position once in a fireside that John Dehlin has made much of as if I had given up belief. I said the history as we believe it is not true, by which I actually meant not accurate. We have had to correct lots of details in the Joseph Smith period. But the fundamental thrust of that history remains the same. God was working among the people I believe and we are the heirs of that great movement."
BYU-I professor Ruthie Robertson was fired for making a private Facebook post about LGBT pride.
Ruthie Robertson was a 22-year-old adjunct faculty member (aka not a professor) who was not renewed for another semester after she made a Facebook post arguing, through logical fallacies and ignorance of scripture, that God is okay with homosexual behavior and the Church's teachings and policies are wrong and harmful. Most people would expect to be fired for publicly criticizing their employer, and recognize that "private Facebook post" is an oxymoron. Oh, and then there's the little detail that she had already apostatized from the Church and was posting on reddit as "exmofeministq". She lied to her employer, the media, and everyone else about being a faithful Latter-day Saint so that she could pull this little publicity stunt. But hey, when it comes to LGBT pride, the ends justify the means, right?
Former MTC President Joseph Bishop attempted to rape McKenna Denson (June Hughes at the time) while she was a missionary there in 1984, and decades later confessed to it on tape.
Bishop made no such confession. In the recording, he said he had a problem with sexual misconduct and asked Denson's forgiveness, but said he didn't remember any attempt to rape her. Bishop had dementia and at the time was on painkillers from surgery a few days earlier. In the recording it's very obvious that Denson took advantage of his confused mental state to direct the conversation, as happens with false confessions all the time, but even so, he did not make the confession that people claimed he made. Furthermore, Denson is a pathological liar with a record of false rape accusations and fraudulent lawsuits (not to mention other things, like soliciting donations by pretending to have cancer) going back literally to before her mission. That's why she had to change her name in the first place. When the Church's lawyers documented these facts, they were demonized for trying to smear her. When her former biggest supporter and avowed enemy of the Church Mike Norton documented these facts, he was applauded for his bravery and integrity. Her credibility disintegrated overnight and never recovered.
The books View of the Hebrews, Wonders of Nature and Providence, and Manuscript Found all contain the words "Moroni", "Mormon", "Lamanites", and "Nephites".
Christian YouTuber "It's Me Jessie" has produced some truly craptacular videos attacking The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but even she apparently realized how laughable the many Book of Mormon plagiarism hypotheses are. I can only assume that's why she tried to bolster them by pulling this claim out of her butt, and I also assume she never thought anyone would actually take her up on her suggestion to "look into" the aforementioned books. But I thought Christians weren't supposed to bear false witness?
If the Church is going to act like a business then it needs to start paying taxes.
The Church does pay taxes on its for-profit enterprises, which for legal purposes are incorporated under a separate entity. Duh.
The LD$ Church is all about money.
In fairness, that would explain why it charges admission for General Conference, devotionals, temple open houses, and pageants, and charges for its magazine subscriptions and website memberships, and has gift shops and donation buckets at temples and church history sites, and only proselytizes or invests infrastructure in prosperous parts of the world... oh wait.
The Church is in decline.
Are these people in denial or just really bad at math? While it is true that the Church has gone through a time of crisis in recent years, the people resigning have never been more than a fraction of a percent of the total membership, and even with far from perfect convert retention, the Church continues to organize stakes and build temples. Of course, there are those who claim that the new temples are just to create a "facade" of growth. Whatever. You know, you can still believe the Church is false if you acknowledge that it's growing. Refusing to do so just makes you look like an idiot.
The Church only grows in third-world countries because they don't have access to the internet.
People in West Africa had access to materials about the Church in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, and 70s, including critical ones. In 1963, the Nigerian Outlook published an angry letter from Ambrose Chukwu, a college student in California, that led to an outcry and the government refusing to issue missionary visas. In 1972, prospective Saint Anie Dick Obot received a pamphlet called "Three Reasons Not to Become a Mormon" and passed it around to the other prospective Saints. The next year, twenty-five prospective congregations led by E.E. Akpan renamed themselves "Grace and Truth Church" after reading the book Mormonism: Shadow or Reality? In 1989, "The God Makers" was shown on Ghanaian national television and a week later all missionaries were expelled and church meetings banned for eighteen months. In 2008, scam artist Darlington W. Gbee formed the now-defunct African Exmormon Foundation in Liberia to spread anti-Mormon books and DVDs, and appeared on the radio and in newspapers.
Matt Martinish of the Cumorah foundation also did an analysis, which is more than any critic has bothered to do, and found that "positive and negative influences of the internet on Latter-day Saint growth are nearly equal in strength resulting in little to no fluctuation in membership and congregational growth trends from the recent past in most countries around the world."
There is not one shred of evidence for the Book of Mormon.
It’s easier to keep repeating this and wishing it were true than to actually address the mountains of evidence that have been compiled, especially if you don’t know English very well and think that "evidence" is another word for "proof". See my page "Is There Any Evidence for the Book of Mormon"?
Latter-day Saints believe things just because other Saints/their parents/their leaders tell them to.
This one is popular among atheists who think that the billions of people who disagree with them re: the existence of deity are all just gullible and stupid. I can't speak for all Latter-day Saints, but anyone who knows anything about our religion knows that its truth claims aren't based on "because I said so". Every Latter-day Saint is familiar with the exhortation to find out for ourselves whether the Book of Mormon or anything else is true by asking God directly. It's one thing to believe, as an atheist presumably would, that the responses we receive are just our imaginations; it's another thing entirely to feign ignorance that they happen. (Granted, many Saints do this themselves in a way, by refusing to pray about doctrines or policies they disagree with, because that would require them to consider the possibility that they could be wrong.)
