Anti-Mormonism
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has many detractors. With some overlap, their ranks include other Christians, primarily evangelicals, who believe that it teaches a false gospel; former members like myself who (often justifiably) feel misled and/or mistreated; to an increasing number of militant atheists who would like to eradicate religion altogether and consider it an easy target. Their motives, sincerity, and intellectual honesty vary widely. Since I became something of a critic myself, of course my perspective and the contents of this page have changed a bit. But I still don't have much respect for people who just go around trying to deconvert others for the sake of deconverting them. Life is short and cruel and I think people should believe whatever they want as long as they aren't harming anyone. I restrict my activism against the church to the areas in which it harms people.
Same Old, Same Old
Criticisms of the church often feel new and shocking to those who read them for the first time, as they did to me, because the church for a long time went to great lengths to not acknowledge them. But most of them have been in circulation for a very long time. In 1997 a pair of evangelical scholars wrote, "It is a point of fact that the Latter-day Saints are not an anti-intellectual group like Jehovah's Witnesses. Mormons, in distinction to groups like JWs, produce work that has more than the mere appearance of scholarship... Mormon scholars and apologists (not all apologists are scholars) have, with varying degrees of success, answered most of the usual evangelical criticisms. Often these answers adequately diffuse particular (minor) criticisms. When the criticism has not been diffused the issue has usually been made much more complex...
"[C]urrently there are, as far as we are aware, no books from an evangelical perspective that responsibly interact with contemporary LDS scholarly and apologetic writings. In a survey of twenty recent evangelical books on Mormonism we found that none interact with this growing body of literature. Only a handful demonstrate any awareness of pertinent works. Many of the authors promote criticisms that have long been refuted; some are sensationalistic while others are simply ridiculous. A number of these books claim to be 'the definitive' book on the matter... [A]t the academic level evangelicals are losing the debate with the Mormons. We are losing the battle and do not know it. In recent years the sophistication and erudition of LDS apologetics has risen considerably while evangelical responses have not."
The paper was met with much outrage and little improvement, and its observations apply to many secular critics as well. With that being the case, it isn't my purpose to list or respond to specific criticisms here. The foremost apologetics organization is called FAIR (formerly the Foundation for Apologetics Information and Research, now Faithful Answers, Informed Response). I used to idolize it; now I think it's intellectually dishonest garbage. I think the Interpreter Foundation, Saints Unscripted, and Mormonr are much better resources even though I still disagree with their conclusions. All such organizations or individuals are unofficial and not endorsed by the church, which rarely responds to critics itself. In 1838 Parley P. Pratt responded to an anti-Mormon book with a book of his own, but in it he wrote, "Why do the Elders of the Church hold their peace, instead of contradicting the various falsehoods, which are published concerning them and their principles? The answer is, it would require a standing army of writers and printers in constant employ; for no sooner are our enemies detected in one falsehood, than a thousand more are put in circulation by them: and there are many who love a lie so much more than the truth, that we are quite willing they should enjoy their strong delusion."
I'd like to put a word in edgewise that the tactics used by anti-Muslims to lie about the religion of well over a billion people are often quite similar. The astounding hypocrisy of some so-called Saints who don't like it when others bear false witness against their faith, but have no problem doing exactly that to someone else's faith, makes me physically ill.
"[C]urrently there are, as far as we are aware, no books from an evangelical perspective that responsibly interact with contemporary LDS scholarly and apologetic writings. In a survey of twenty recent evangelical books on Mormonism we found that none interact with this growing body of literature. Only a handful demonstrate any awareness of pertinent works. Many of the authors promote criticisms that have long been refuted; some are sensationalistic while others are simply ridiculous. A number of these books claim to be 'the definitive' book on the matter... [A]t the academic level evangelicals are losing the debate with the Mormons. We are losing the battle and do not know it. In recent years the sophistication and erudition of LDS apologetics has risen considerably while evangelical responses have not."
The paper was met with much outrage and little improvement, and its observations apply to many secular critics as well. With that being the case, it isn't my purpose to list or respond to specific criticisms here. The foremost apologetics organization is called FAIR (formerly the Foundation for Apologetics Information and Research, now Faithful Answers, Informed Response). I used to idolize it; now I think it's intellectually dishonest garbage. I think the Interpreter Foundation, Saints Unscripted, and Mormonr are much better resources even though I still disagree with their conclusions. All such organizations or individuals are unofficial and not endorsed by the church, which rarely responds to critics itself. In 1838 Parley P. Pratt responded to an anti-Mormon book with a book of his own, but in it he wrote, "Why do the Elders of the Church hold their peace, instead of contradicting the various falsehoods, which are published concerning them and their principles? The answer is, it would require a standing army of writers and printers in constant employ; for no sooner are our enemies detected in one falsehood, than a thousand more are put in circulation by them: and there are many who love a lie so much more than the truth, that we are quite willing they should enjoy their strong delusion."
I'd like to put a word in edgewise that the tactics used by anti-Muslims to lie about the religion of well over a billion people are often quite similar. The astounding hypocrisy of some so-called Saints who don't like it when others bear false witness against their faith, but have no problem doing exactly that to someone else's faith, makes me physically ill.
Quantity Over Quality
Rather than get into in-depth discussions of a few issues, many critics opt to overwhelm Latter-day Saints with quantity instead. This often means essentially sharing a list of bullet points - in what apologists like to call the "Big List fallacy" - to convey the impression that the church is irredeemably full of problems or that there is a mountain of evidence against it. The critic may say something to the effect of, "We're not dealing with one or two things here; there are just too many issues" or "If only ten percent of these are true, the church is still false." That's accurate, but in my opinion this tactic is borderline abusive. Launching an all-out assault on someone's religious identity and potentially sending them into an existential crisis is cruel. Copy-pasting or even writing out arguments against the church takes only a few seconds or minutes; responding to each one of them takes much longer. Many people don't have that kind of time or patience, so they may not even try; or if they do, it takes long enough that the critic can continue to spout additional points and crow over their victory.
Another facet of this is mockery and ridicule. The church is called a "cult", "LD$ Inc.", the "MORmON Church" the "Morg [Mormon + Borg]", and "TSCC [That So-Called Church]". Joseph Smith is called a "con man", "pedophile", and "adulterer". Believers are called "cultists", "sheeple", "MORmONS", "Morgbots", and accused of "drinking the Kool-Aid". Ad hominem terms like this, along with snark and sarcasm and other forms of condescension, frequently come from places of legitimate anger but don't help anyone. I try really hard to avoid them. Anything bad or stupid that a Saint ever did is extrapolated to the whole group and presented as yet another nail in the coffin of the church's truth claims. The aim is to make Saints feel embarrassed and foolish about their beliefs so that the critics' arguments against them seem even more damning. Militant atheists use the same tactic against believers in general. Of course LDS apologists are often rude themselves, and I condemn that too.
Another facet of this is mockery and ridicule. The church is called a "cult", "LD$ Inc.", the "MORmON Church" the "Morg [Mormon + Borg]", and "TSCC [That So-Called Church]". Joseph Smith is called a "con man", "pedophile", and "adulterer". Believers are called "cultists", "sheeple", "MORmONS", "Morgbots", and accused of "drinking the Kool-Aid". Ad hominem terms like this, along with snark and sarcasm and other forms of condescension, frequently come from places of legitimate anger but don't help anyone. I try really hard to avoid them. Anything bad or stupid that a Saint ever did is extrapolated to the whole group and presented as yet another nail in the coffin of the church's truth claims. The aim is to make Saints feel embarrassed and foolish about their beliefs so that the critics' arguments against them seem even more damning. Militant atheists use the same tactic against believers in general. Of course LDS apologists are often rude themselves, and I condemn that too.
Transparency and the "Internet Apostasy"
Though few of the critics' tactics or arguments are new, they have gotten a much larger audience since the invention of the internet. Thousands of members doing innocent Google searches have been blindsided by aspects of church history they weren't taught, or by evidences against the church's claims. In August 2010, at age seventeen, I was one of them. I understand very well the feelings of cognitive dissonance, betrayal, and anger. In December 2011 Church Historian Marlin K. Jensen remarked, "Maybe since Kirtland, we've never had a period of - I'll call it apostasy, like we're having now." Still, he later followed up, "I think we are at a time of challenge, but it isn't apocalyptic" and "To say we are experiencing some Titanic-like wave of apostasy is inaccurate." Church spokesman Michael Purdy added, "Those leaving the church are a fraction of 1 percent each year and it is a trend that is decreasing rather than increasing." At such times one must reexamine one's reasons for believing in the first place and make a conscious choice whether or not to continue doing so. This often requires a paradigm shift and a re-evaluation of old assumptions, and many find it difficult, particularly with critics mocking such efforts as "mental gymnastics". My then-recent spiritual experiences and my testimony of the Book of Mormon kept me in the church for almost another twelve years.
The church's approach to writing history has mirrored most cultures' approach to history writing until recently - that is, it prioritized putting itself in a positive light. When historian Leonard Arrington tried to update its approach with more balance and transparency in the 1970s, he faced considerable resistance from leaders such as Mark E. Petersen, Ezra Taft Benson, and Boyd K. Packer - driven, in my opinion, not by an intent to deceive so much as a persecution complex and an insecurity in their beliefs. This has caused problems. Dallin H. Oaks explained, "It’s an old problem, the extent to which official histories, whatever they are, or semi-official histories, get into things that are shadowy or less well-known or whatever. That’s an old problem in Mormonism - a feeling of members that they shouldn’t have been surprised by the fact that this or that happened, they should’ve been alerted to it. I have felt that throughout my life. There are several different elements of that. One element is that we’re emerging from a period of history writing within the Church [of] adoring history that doesn’t deal with anything that’s unfavorable, and we’re coming into a period of 'warts and all' kind of history. Perhaps our writing of history is lagging behind the times, but I believe that there is purpose in all these things - there may have been a time when Church members could not have been as well prepared for that kind of historical writing as they may be now.
"On the other hand, there are constraints on trying to reveal everything. You don’t want to be getting into and creating doubts that didn’t exist in the first place. And what is plenty of history for one person is inadequate for another, and we have a large church, and that’s a big problem. And another problem is there are a lot of things that the Church has written about that the members haven’t read. And the Sunday School teacher that gives 'Brother Jones' his understanding of Church history may be inadequately informed and may not reveal something which the Church has published. It’s in the history written for college or Institute students, sources written for quite mature students, but not every Sunday School teacher that introduces people to a history is familiar with that. And so there is no way to avoid this criticism. The best I can say is that we’re moving with the times, we’re getting more and more forthright, but we will never satisfy every complaint along that line and probably shouldn’t."
Patrick Mason noted, "In their effort to put the church's best foot forward and offer inspiration, hope, and guidance to the Saints, church leaders and teachers have usually steered clear of the more controversial aspects of our past. I am convinced this is not, as some have accused, part of a massive conspiratorial cover-up campaign. It has more often been undertaken as an act of ministry. There is enough trouble and strife in this world, and many people come to church simply to get a bit of peace, inspiration, and strength to carry on. When they attend a sacrament meeting or a Sunday School class, most are not looking for an academic history lecture, with its intricate arguments and counterarguments. Those who are disappointed that church meetings are not as intellectually stimulating or historically nuanced as university classes suffer from category confusion; they would surely not expect or appreciate a sermon from their college professor. We can and should expect that when the church and its leaders do talk about history, they do so responsibly and accurately. At the same time, we must remember that the church is primarily concerned with preaching the gospel of christ, not adult history education."
The church has made an effort since circa 2011 to be more open about its history. Elder Jensen described then-current church manuals as "severely outdated" and said of the new curriculum materials, "If they are not revolutionary, they are at least going to be a breath of fresh air across the church." Despite this, there are many apologists who will try to pretend the church has been perfectly transparent all along and that nothing has changed. They say things like "I was aware of these controversial issues my whole life, so everyone else should have been too, and if they didn't it's their own fault for being lazy and not reading anything", but this attitude is arrogant, inaccurate, and unfair, and I have very little patience for it. Most members have busy lives and other things to do than study church history to find things they should have already learned in church settings. I love studying church history, but other people have different interests.
The church's approach to writing history has mirrored most cultures' approach to history writing until recently - that is, it prioritized putting itself in a positive light. When historian Leonard Arrington tried to update its approach with more balance and transparency in the 1970s, he faced considerable resistance from leaders such as Mark E. Petersen, Ezra Taft Benson, and Boyd K. Packer - driven, in my opinion, not by an intent to deceive so much as a persecution complex and an insecurity in their beliefs. This has caused problems. Dallin H. Oaks explained, "It’s an old problem, the extent to which official histories, whatever they are, or semi-official histories, get into things that are shadowy or less well-known or whatever. That’s an old problem in Mormonism - a feeling of members that they shouldn’t have been surprised by the fact that this or that happened, they should’ve been alerted to it. I have felt that throughout my life. There are several different elements of that. One element is that we’re emerging from a period of history writing within the Church [of] adoring history that doesn’t deal with anything that’s unfavorable, and we’re coming into a period of 'warts and all' kind of history. Perhaps our writing of history is lagging behind the times, but I believe that there is purpose in all these things - there may have been a time when Church members could not have been as well prepared for that kind of historical writing as they may be now.
"On the other hand, there are constraints on trying to reveal everything. You don’t want to be getting into and creating doubts that didn’t exist in the first place. And what is plenty of history for one person is inadequate for another, and we have a large church, and that’s a big problem. And another problem is there are a lot of things that the Church has written about that the members haven’t read. And the Sunday School teacher that gives 'Brother Jones' his understanding of Church history may be inadequately informed and may not reveal something which the Church has published. It’s in the history written for college or Institute students, sources written for quite mature students, but not every Sunday School teacher that introduces people to a history is familiar with that. And so there is no way to avoid this criticism. The best I can say is that we’re moving with the times, we’re getting more and more forthright, but we will never satisfy every complaint along that line and probably shouldn’t."
Patrick Mason noted, "In their effort to put the church's best foot forward and offer inspiration, hope, and guidance to the Saints, church leaders and teachers have usually steered clear of the more controversial aspects of our past. I am convinced this is not, as some have accused, part of a massive conspiratorial cover-up campaign. It has more often been undertaken as an act of ministry. There is enough trouble and strife in this world, and many people come to church simply to get a bit of peace, inspiration, and strength to carry on. When they attend a sacrament meeting or a Sunday School class, most are not looking for an academic history lecture, with its intricate arguments and counterarguments. Those who are disappointed that church meetings are not as intellectually stimulating or historically nuanced as university classes suffer from category confusion; they would surely not expect or appreciate a sermon from their college professor. We can and should expect that when the church and its leaders do talk about history, they do so responsibly and accurately. At the same time, we must remember that the church is primarily concerned with preaching the gospel of christ, not adult history education."
The church has made an effort since circa 2011 to be more open about its history. Elder Jensen described then-current church manuals as "severely outdated" and said of the new curriculum materials, "If they are not revolutionary, they are at least going to be a breath of fresh air across the church." Despite this, there are many apologists who will try to pretend the church has been perfectly transparent all along and that nothing has changed. They say things like "I was aware of these controversial issues my whole life, so everyone else should have been too, and if they didn't it's their own fault for being lazy and not reading anything", but this attitude is arrogant, inaccurate, and unfair, and I have very little patience for it. Most members have busy lives and other things to do than study church history to find things they should have already learned in church settings. I love studying church history, but other people have different interests.
Conclusion
My father shared this perspective, which I no longer share but which some may find helpful: "[W]hen you kids were small and I would race you to the house, I gave you a huge head start because I knew I could still easily beat you. Knowing I could breeze past you with hardly any effort, I wasn’t even remotely intimidated by your fledgling physical abilities. So in these situations where it looks like God, or his people, are losing, I just remind myself that I may not completely understand the rules or where the goals really are. God will win, he’s not intimidated, and he’s made that perfectly clear. And he put us here to win with him. I don’t condone blind faith, mind you; rather, I’ve seen and experienced enough to know that he is totally on top of his game." It is true, regardless of one's vewpoint, that trying to tear down the church altogether is a waste of time. In July 1844 the New York Weekly Herald reported, "Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet is dead. Thus ends Mormonism." That about sums it up. For example, when the countercult group Concerned "Christians" was founded in Arizona in 1978, there was only one temple in Arizona. Now there are six and the group barely still exists. Still, I think it's self-evident that critics have had more of an impact than the leaders of the church would like to admit, whether in reducing its growth rate or bringing about policy changes.
Now, if you wish, you may take the Cult Quiz to make sure you're not in a cult, see some myths critics perpetuate, read a review of Mark Twain's review of the Book of Mormon, read yet another review of the "CES Letter", learn about the demise of Mormonism that you may not be familiar with, read an an overview of evidence for the Book of Mormon, read Jim Bennett's hilarious Facebook reviews of the very fictional TV series "Under the Banner of Heaven", or see if you can take on Hugh Nibley's Book of Mormon Challenge and equal Joseph Smith's achievement.
Now, if you wish, you may take the Cult Quiz to make sure you're not in a cult, see some myths critics perpetuate, read a review of Mark Twain's review of the Book of Mormon, read yet another review of the "CES Letter", learn about the demise of Mormonism that you may not be familiar with, read an an overview of evidence for the Book of Mormon, read Jim Bennett's hilarious Facebook reviews of the very fictional TV series "Under the Banner of Heaven", or see if you can take on Hugh Nibley's Book of Mormon Challenge and equal Joseph Smith's achievement.
