So we know the 'church' is a fraud, where does that leave...

[drumdude]

I often think of the LDS church as positioned between Scientology and mainstream Christianity.

It’s not as harmful as Scientology or as obviously fraudulent, and its leaders are not as malicious as David Miscavidge. But at the same time the LDS church has a track record of hiding history, hiding finances, and other actions that are typical of a “high demand religion.” Keeping you from your daughter’s wedding unless you pay up is not something mainstream Christian churches do.

I would love a word that perfectly encapsulates that position of the LDS church on the spectrum. I don’t think there is one that really fits. It’s not quite a cult, but not quite your standard benign religion either.

[Res Ipsa]

I think there is a meaning of the word fraud that can be fairly applied to the COJCOLDS: "one that is not what it seems or is represented to be." https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fraud Used that way, I don't think it requires that anyone have an intent to deceive. The thread title could be reworded as: "So we know that the 'church' it not what it is represented to be, where does that leave us" without changing the meaning of the question asked.

I think it is more accurate for most ex-LDS people to say, “I now see that the LDS Church is not what I believed it to be, so where does that leave me?” There is a huge difference in perspective that separates one side of conversion from another. Conversion, in my view, changes prior viewpoints so profoundly that it is difficult for the person who has undergone conversion to judge their former perspective accurately or fairly.

I have seen this kind of thing in the unraveling of a marriage (not mine, thankfully). The one partner who was once loved and appreciated in many ways becomes a different person in the eyes of the disillusioned partner. The former view of a decent partner is sometimes reframed as a lie, a deception, or a fraud by the person who is leaving the relationship. Usually, the truth is a lot more complicated. The former view may have been too forgiving, the new view may be overly critical. A crucial difference bringing a person from one view to the other is their own transformed perspective. Choice is a component of the process.

Maybe it was unhealthy for the person to be so forgiving of their partner’s faults. Perhaps it is healthier for them to be more critical now. Or, maybe they are being overly critical as a psychological mechanism to enable them to pull away from a part of their lives they were deeply embedded in. Maybe their former partner wasn’t the terrible person they make them out to be after all. One thing that is certain is that the departing partner’s view of their ex has changed irrevocably in ways that facilitate separation. We should take all of these narratives with a grain of salt, while wishing the best for the person who has decided to make this profound personal change.

I don't feel I have sufficient information to make that kind of generalization about most ex-Mormons. But the analogy to marriages seems weak to me. A marriage involves two people who change over time in important ways. That's very different from an institution that makes specific claims about what it is that stay constant over time. The COJCOLDS makes very specific claims about what it is. Those of us who were missionaries should be pretty familiar those claims. The most fundamental of these is that it is the one and only true, restored church of Jesus Christ upon the earth today. That's what I was told for the first 19 years of my life and it's what I believed. I believed exactly what the church represented itself to be.

Once I became aware of a much broader set of facts than what the church had told me, a number of which the church actively concealed, it became apparent that the fundamental claims of the church was simply false. That's not just me being mistaken about what the church was. That's the church representing itself as something that it is not.

[Kishkumen]

I don't feel I have sufficient information to make that kind of generalization about most ex-Mormons.

What I was hoping to convey there was the subjective nature of the question. In applying the definition you chose, you turn what I think is a subjective question into an objective one. With a Ponzi scheme, one is promised certain hard investment returns, and then it turns out that the person running it is not paying out with investment revenue but with the money from new victims. That is definitely something that objectively is not what it represents itself to be.

But the analogy to marriages seems weak to me. A marriage involves two people who change over time in important ways.

I focused on one side of the partnership for a reason. If you want to apply the analogy in a way that I purposely did not intend, then, sure, it won’t work as well.

That's very different from an institution that makes specific claims about what it is that stay constant over time. The COJCOLDS makes very specific claims about what it is. Those of us who were missionaries should be pretty familiar those claims. The most fundamental of these is that it is the one and only true, restored church of Jesus Christ upon the earth today. That's what I was told for the first 19 years of my life and it's what I believed. I believed exactly what the church represented itself to be.

I am not sure how anyone comes to an objective conclusion that this set of subjective beliefs is not true. Let’s start with faith in the resurrection of Jesus, the basis of all Christianity. At its core, it is something one either chooses to accept or not. The fact that it is a miracle already sets it apart from quotidian human experience. People who leave Christianity tend to do so because of a fundamental change in their perspective on truth, for example, because they decide there are no miracles, not because the basic claims of Christianity suddenly changed. Mormonism has essentially the same core claims with different theology and extra books and rituals. Most people leave Mormonism because of a change in their perspective on truth and thus its claims. The claim that the LDS Church is the one true church was never a provable or disprovable claim.

Honestly, while my sympathy for the suffering this process causes remains, I feel increasingly distant from it as a productive mental exercise. I can appreciate that it is difficult to come to terms with the realization that such claims actually do involve faith, when one also realizes that they do not want to live by faith in such things. But to say that suddenly these faith claims are a fraud strikes me as a category error. I think that the worst we can say about them is that they can be exploited by unscrupulous people, but that does not make the claims themselves fraudulent. What I mean is, you can have a con man who is a pastor, but that does not make Christianity a con.

I would extend the same to Joseph Smith. I have long argued that Joseph Smith’s sincerity is immaterial to Mormonism’s value as a religion. Joseph Smith may have been an awful person, but that does not invalidate what others have made of the movement he started. I find it sadly humorous that so many people are confident that calling Joseph Smith a bad guy proves the LDS Church is bad or that Mormonism is bad. Mormonism is a set of faith claims that in themselves are simply a variation of Christianity. Joseph Smith doesn’t invalidate them because of his bad behavior.

Once I became aware of a much broader set of facts than what the church had told me, a number of which the church actively concealed, it became apparent that the fundamental claims of the church was simply false. That's not just me being mistaken about what the church was. That's the church representing itself as something that it is not.

Every belief system has a narrative, and every narrative will be contested. It will be shaped by people having the opportunity and power to shape it. Look at all of the variations of Christianity from the beginning. Look at how Proto-orthodoxy marginalized Gnosticism, and those were two strikingly different sets of Christian narratives and belief systems. Yeah, the narrative has evolved over time. Joseph Smith reshaped his narrative, and every person after him has reshaped the narrative and the beliefs to an extent. Don Bradley is not telling you what Bruce McConkie would have said to you about Church history and doctrine. Nelson does not agree with Hinckley in all respects. Mormonism is an organic and evolving community like every other human community is. At the same time, like Christianity, it asks that its adherents exercise faith in what it holds out as its unique miraculous claims. There is definitely a big tension between the this-worldliness of its evolution as an organization and what it demands in the realm of faith in miracles.

What we experienced was as much a result of technological revolution as it was a crisis of faith. And what we experienced is probably not so different, at the end of the day, from what QAnon people experience, except that I would like to think our experience was grounded in better thinking and a healthier relationship with the world. But what I am saying is that we were suddenly free to process all kinds of data that we had no access to before, and I am not confident that we always did the best job working with it. Just because it is possible to scramble the current narrative with a lot of new data does not make the results a better or more accurate narrative or worldview.

I think this is one of the fundamental problems with the CES Letter. It is a data dump that creates confusion. It offers no alternative narrative. It just says that the existence of other data is enough to undermine the Church’s narrative. That works pretty well because the LDS Church cannot possibly account for and justify every step in the evolution of its narrative on demand. But, again, I think that is a technological challenge, not a result of dishonesty or even of a false narrative, except perhaps to the extent that all narratives are false in their provisional and tendentious nature.

[Res Ipsa]

Thank you, Reverend, for such a thoughtful response. You have a nuanced approach to religion in general and Mormonism (big tent) in particular that I respect.

I don't feel I have sufficient information to make that kind of generalization about most ex-Mormons.

What I was hoping to convey there was the subjective nature of the question. In applying the definition you chose, you turn what I think is a subjective question into an objective one. With a Ponzi scheme, one is promised certain hard investment returns, and then it turns out that the person running it is not paying out with investment revenue but with the money from new victims. That is definitely something that objectively is not what it represents itself to be.

I agree with your Ponzi scheme example. But I think it’s at one extreme of a spectrum. At the other extreme would probably be God, who makes no direct claims about their nature. Between those two extremes are claims based on some combination of objective evidence and subjective evaluation. Juries have to decide whether representations are false every day based on this combination of objective and subjective. The COJCOLDS makes a large number of factual claims for which evidence is relevant. I agree that subjective judgment is involved to some degree, but, in my opinion, attributing a member’s rejection of the organization entirely to the member’s expectations ignores the fact that the organization sets some of those expectations by its representations about what it is.

Put the analogy to marriages seems weak to me. A marriage involves two people who change over time in important ways.

I focused on one side of the partnership for a reason. If you want to apply the analogy in a way that I purposely did not intend, then, sure, it won’t work as well.

I’m not sure I understand. Even if you focus on one partner, that partner’s reactions will be a product of the interactions between two people, both of whom are directly impacted by the actions of the other. The nature of that interaction is different than the interaction between a person and a relatively static bureaucratic organization.

That's very different from an institution that makes specific claims about what it is that stay constant over time. The COJCOLDS makes very specific claims about what it is. Those of us who were missionaries should be pretty familiar those claims. The most fundamental of these is that it is the one and only true, restored church of Jesus Christ upon the earth today. That's what I was told for the first 19 years of my life and it's what I believed. I believed exactly what the church represented itself to be.

I am not sure how anyone comes to an objective conclusion that this set of subjective beliefs is not true. Let’s start with faith in the resurrection of Jesus, the basis of all Christianity. At its core, it is something one either chooses to accept or not. The fact that it is a miracle already sets it apart from quotidian human experience. People who leave Christianity tend to do so because of a fundamental change in their perspective on truth, for example, because they decide there are no miracles, not because the basic claims of Christianity suddenly changed. Mormonism has essentially the same core claims with different theology and extra books and rituals. Most people leave Mormonism because of a change in their perspective on truth and thus its claims. The claim that the LDS Church is the one true church was never a provable or disprovable claim.[/quote]

The resurrection of Jesus is a factual claim to which evidence applies. That evidence is not accessible to us because of differences in culture and technology and the passage of time. But that doesn’t make it a different kind of question than “Does Res Ipsa own a blue BMW?” (He doesn’t.)

Unless you reject the notion of objective reality, Jesus was either resurrected or he wasn’t. The claim he was is either objectively true or false. That we have little relevant evidence accessible to us doesn’t change the nature of the claim.

There is more accessible evidence that bears on the COJCOLDS’s factual claim that it is the one and only restored church of Jesus Christ. That does make Smith’s credibility as a reliable narrator relevant, as he is the source of the claim. When all evidence is taken into account, he simply isn’t. Moreover, the absence of evidence that Jesus Christ organized a church, let alone one that resembles the COJCOLDS, weighs very heavily against the COJCOLDS’s foundational claim about itself. Again, the claim isn’t subjective — it is either objectively true or it isn’t.

The COJCOLDS differs significantly from almost every other Christian sect in its specific claims about its own nature. That makes them subject to evaluation based on evidence in a way that strictly faith based claims are not.

Outside of the realms of formal logic-based systems, the notion of provable is meaningless without some sort of standard. If we apply the standard of more probable than not, there is nothing unreasonable or irrational about stating that the evidence shows it is more probable than not that the COJCOLDS’s fundamental claim about its own nature is false than it is true. It’s no different than the hundreds of assessments we make about various claims every day. Maybe it’s possible to make a case that evaluation of the church’s claims about itself are qualitatively different without special pleading, but I’m skeptical.

Honestly, while my sympathy for the suffering this process causes remains, I feel increasingly distant from it as a productive mental exercise. I can appreciate that it is difficult to come to terms with the realization that such claims actually do involve faith, when one also realizes that they do not want to live by faith in such things. But to say that suddenly these faith claims are a fraud strikes me as a category error. I think that the worst we can say about them is that they can be exploited by unscrupulous people, but that does not make the claims themselves fraudulent. What I mean is, you can have a con man who is a pastor, but that does not make Christianity a con.

I don’t feel sympathy, but I do feel compassion. I think the process of disaffiliation from the COJCOLDS in general results in unnecessary trauma and damage to individuals, marriages, and families. Not in every case, but in far too many. I lay responsibility for that with the organization itself. The trauma and damage that occurs is a natural consequence of the organization’s doctrine and operations.

At the same time, I can understand the distancing you feel. I feel it, too. The exit process was traumatic for me. And I was lucky — others experience much more trauma. I’m pretty agnostic on how to best navigate that trauma. But I do think it’s mentally healthy to navigate it and not dwell in it. I accept that it was something that happened and accept that it is part of who I am. I like who I am, and I don’t know who I’d be if my parents had been Lutherans. But that’s me, and I accept that others process trauma differently.


I disagree with your framing of the process. The expectations of what it means to live by faith are set by the church itself. It’s one thing to teach that faith is the evidence of things not seen. It’s another to require in practice a belief that is contrary to things seen. I don’t the problem is that members don’t understand faith. I think it’s the organization’s failure to meet the expectations that it sets that leads people to disaffiliate and others to join fringe Mormon groups. Faithful members don’t form their understanding of what it means to live by faith in a vacuum.

I would extend the same to Joseph Smith. I have long argued that Joseph Smith’s sincerity is immaterial to Mormonism’s value as a religion. Joseph Smith may have been an awful person, but that does not invalidate what others have made of the movement he started. I find it sadly humorous that so many people are confident that calling Joseph Smith a bad guy proves the LDS Church is bad or that Mormonism is bad. Mormonism is a set of faith claims that in themselves are simply a variation of Christianity. Joseph Smith doesn’t invalidate them because of his bad behavior.

I don’t equate “true” with “good” or “false” with “bad”. I don’t see any necessary connection. So, I agree that Smith’s character or sincerity is irrelevant to whether there organization he founded is “good” or “bad.” (I think it has had both good and bad effects over time.) On the other hand, Smith’s status as a reliable narrator is very relevant to the organization’s fundamental claim about itself.

Once I became aware of a much broader set of facts than what the church had told me, a number of which the church actively concealed, it became apparent that the fundamental claims of the church was simply false. That's not just me being mistaken about what the church was. That's the church representing itself as something that it is not.

Every belief system has a narrative, and every narrative will be contested. It will be shaped by people having the opportunity and power to shape it. Look at all of the variations of Christianity from the beginning. Look at how Proto-orthodoxy marginalized Gnosticism, and those were two strikingly different sets of Christian narratives and belief systems. Yeah, the narrative has evolved over time. Joseph Smith reshaped his narrative, and every person after him has reshaped the narrative and the beliefs to an extent. Don Bradley is not telling you what Bruce McConkie would have said to you about Church history and doctrine. Nelson does not agree with Hinckley in all respects. Mormonism is an organic and evolving community like every other human community is. At the same time, like Christianity, it asks that its adherents exercise faith in what it holds out as its unique miraculous claims. There is definitely a big tension between the this-worldliness of its evolution as an organization and what it demands in the realm of faith in miracles.

What we experienced was as much a result of technological revolution as it was a crisis of faith. And what we experienced is probably not so different, at the end of the day, from what QAnon people experience, except that I would like to think our experience was grounded in better thinking and a healthier relationship with the world. But what I am saying is that we were suddenly free to process all kinds of data that we had no access to before, and I am not confident that we always did the best job working with it. Just because it is possible to scramble the current narrative with a lot of new data does not make the results a better or more accurate narrative or worldview.

I do like using the concept of narratives in thinking through these issues. I agree that Mormonism as a community has had an evolving narrative, just like any other human community. But that doesn’t change the fundamental claim of the organization that it is a unique organization that possesses divine authority that every other human community lacks. That claim has remained a constant.

I left pre-internet, so what happened to me wasn’t a technological change. But it was access to some data that I hadn’t had access to before. I wouldn’t describe it as scrambling the narrative, but as contradicting the narrative. I would describe the experience as opposite to that of Q-anon folks. I hadn’t discovered a new truth. I lost the only truth I thought I had. I didn’t feel enlightened. I felt empty and lost.

I think this is one of the fundamental problems with the CES Letter. It is a data dump that creates confusion. It offers no alternative narrative. It just says that the existence of other data is enough to undermine the Church’s narrative. That works pretty well because the LDS Church cannot possibly account for and justify every step in the evolution of its narrative on demand. But, again, I think that is a technological challenge, not a result of dishonesty or even of a false narrative, except perhaps to the extent that all narratives are false in their provisional and tendentious nature.

I have no opinion on the CES letter. I’m not the target audience. I think you raise a question that I’ve personally wrestled with: when arguing that a narrative is false, is there an obligation to present an alternative narrative to replace it? My zone leaders made a similar argument to me as a reason not to reject the church — I had no better alternative in mind. I wasn’t persuaded. But I also have never tried to persuade LDS friends or family to leave the church. I think that’s in part because I don’t claim to have a substitute narrative that I can claim will be better for them.

I really enjoy the fact that, even though I may not agree, you always affect how I think about whatever it is we are discussing.

[Kishkumen]

Thank you, Reverend, for such a thoughtful response. You have a nuanced approach to religion in general and Mormonism (big tent) in particular that I respect.

Thank you for your thoughtful reply, RI. You are one of my favorite interlocutors on the board. You always bring challenging arguments and worthwhile perspectives to the table.

I agree with your Ponzi scheme example. But I think it’s at one extreme of a spectrum. At the other extreme would probably be God, who makes no direct claims about their nature. Between those two extremes are claims based on some combination of objective evidence and subjective evaluation. Juries have to decide whether representations are false every day based on this combination of objective and subjective. The COJCOLDS makes a large number of factual claims for which evidence is relevant. I agree that subjective judgment is involved to some degree, but, in my opinion, attributing a member’s rejection of the organization entirely to the member’s expectations ignores the fact that the organization sets some of those expectations by its representations about what it is.

So, in my view, the LDS Church has problems that spring out of the time of its creation. It is a modern phenomenon, and it has a materialist cosmology. Ergo, it is kind of up the creek without a paddle because it asks people to believe historical claims as literally true in the physical world, while at the same time saying that God is intervening in the world in ways that materialists don't generally accept unless they could be proven with hard evidence.

It is a quandary. And, I think that one could say that, in a narrow sense, Mormonism is a "fraud" according to your definition because of this problem.

Think of the affidavits that constitute the witness statements for the plates. To my eyes, these are completely absurd documents. They are so far from being persuasive in any meaningful sense, and yet apologists defend them at face value. The arguments made in favor of them go no further than the internal rhetoric of the documents themselves. One is asked to believe that all one needs is trust in the honor of the witness to accept the witness as factually accurate.

Who actually believes anything like that today?

I think that Bushman was a lot closer to the truth when he focused on Mormons' personal experience of the narrative. Another way of putting this would be to acknowledge that we are talking about living the myth, but unfortunately people devalue and denigrate myth, when it is a perfectly useful word. I am happy to accept that someone can sincerely believe their experience, and I may even choose to join them in that experience, but I do not feel obliged to accept their experience as something that defines the world for everyone.

The Book of Mormon is a document that applies the myth of Israel, as seen through a Christian lens, as a means of uniting people who belong to different cultures. In doing so, it proposes a new, and quite alien etiology for the indigenous peoples of America, but it does, to Smith's credit, in my view, challenge the innate superiority of European civilization and incorporate elements of native belief and thought.

At the end of the day, it is a myth. It has to be a myth. What I don't think it is, however, is a fraud in the sense of a criminal enterprise. If you stick to a narrow sense of "not being what it purports to be" in terms contemporary to us, then, yes, one might call it a fraud. I just find the word to be unnecessarily prejudicial, much like the word cult.

I’m not sure I understand. Even if you focus on one partner, that partner’s reactions will be a product of the interactions between two people, both of whom are directly impacted by the actions of the other. The nature of that interaction is different than the interaction between a person and a relatively static bureaucratic organization.

Yeah, maybe we aren't going to make any headway on this point. I am happy to drop it. We may just have different ideas about what constitutes a useful analogy. I am fine with being more selective in how I employ an analogy. My point is about likening personal conversion to a marriage. I think it is possible to consider going through falling in and out of love, with the concomitant formal commitment and its severance, at least as an analogy, to converting to and away from a religion. There is a subjective element to both that has a lot to do with one's changing internal attitudes and perspective through the life of the relationship.

The resurrection of Jesus is a factual claim to which evidence applies. That evidence is not accessible to us because of differences in culture and technology and the passage of time. But that doesn’t make it a different kind of question than “Does Res Ipsa own a blue BMW?” (He doesn’t.)

I am not sure that is true. Miracles and paradoxes occupy their own place in the history of Western thought. There is nothing paradoxical about your owning of a blue BMW. Nor would such a fact have ever entered into a special category or genre in ancient literature. Not so with things like coming back from the dead. The treatment of such things in antiquity was a lot more rich, nuanced, and complex. It kind of depended on the context.

The context around the resurrection is one miracle or paradox after another. Clearly, the world is not working in a normal way around and in Jesus, so I don't find it useful to compare his resurrection with your ownership of a blue BMW at all.

Unless you reject the notion of objective reality, Jesus was either resurrected or he wasn’t. The claim he was is either objectively true or false. That we have little relevant evidence accessible to us doesn’t change the nature of the claim.

I don't reject the notion of objective reality. I believe it has its place. It is just not the only place.

There is more accessible evidence that bears on the COJCOLDS’s factual claim that it is the one and only restored church of Jesus Christ. That does make Smith’s credibility as a reliable narrator relevant, as he is the source of the claim. When all evidence is taken into account, he simply isn’t. Moreover, the absence of evidence that Jesus Christ organized a church, let alone one that resembles the COJCOLDS, weighs very heavily against the COJCOLDS’s foundational claim about itself. Again, the claim isn’t subjective — it is either objectively true or it isn’t.

I couldn't disagree more. Honestly, I just don't know how one measures such a claim. There are too many unknown variables in that one.

The COJCOLDS differs significantly from almost every other Christian sect in its specific claims about its own nature. That makes them subject to evaluation based on evidence in a way that strictly faith based claims are not.

I view that to be its outdated rhetorical pose. Whether it can or will move beyond it, or just die, remains to be seen.

Outside of the realms of formal logic-based systems, the notion of provable is meaningless without some sort of standard. If we apply the standard of more probable than not, there is nothing unreasonable or irrational about stating that the evidence shows it is more probable than not that the COJCOLDS’s fundamental claim about its own nature is false than it is true. It’s no different than the hundreds of assessments we make about various claims every day. Maybe it’s possible to make a case that evaluation of the church’s claims about itself are qualitatively different without special pleading, but I’m skeptical.

The miraculous and paradoxical are by nature on the unlikely end of the spectrum. It makes them resistant to probability arguments with those who accept and stick by miraculous and/or paradoxical claims.

I disagree with your framing of the process. The expectations of what it means to live by faith are set by the church itself. It’s one thing to teach that faith is the evidence of things not seen. It’s another to require in practice a belief that is contrary to things seen. I don’t the problem is that members don’t understand faith. I think it’s the organization’s failure to meet the expectations that it sets that leads people to disaffiliate and others to join fringe Mormon groups. Faithful members don’t form their understanding of what it means to live by faith in a vacuum.

OK. Yes, my framing is very different. I tend to think it is more accurate to say that faith is the evidence of experience. The Book of Mormon uses sight less than taste in its most eloquent discussion of faith (Alma). Perhaps it would be better for the LDS Church, especially its leaders and thinkers, to develop that concept a little more fully. I do think both the members and the Church itself struggle to understand the Book of Mormon's definition of faith. Maybe the Church would do a better job of matching member expectations if they put more thought into what the Book of Mormon has to say on this issue. Because, you are right, frustrated expectations does lead its people to affiliate with fringe groups or disaffiliate altogether.

I don’t equate “true” with “good” or “false” with “bad”. I don’t see any necessary connection. So, I agree that Smith’s character or sincerity is irrelevant to whether their organization he founded is “good” or “bad.” (I think it has had both good and bad effects over time.) On the other hand, Smith’s status as a reliable narrator is very relevant to the organization’s fundamental claim about itself.

Sure! Yes. And, he has some real problems there. But, he also fits within certain types of the divine revelator that are found all over the place in myth. Trying to nail down Smith is like trying to catch Silenus, Proteus, or Picus and Faunus. The apparently fraudulent is regularly mixed in with divine truth. People naturally desire to have clearcut answers, and they can be lured in by the promise of them. But sometimes the answers don't come in neat, digestible packages. Mormonism is weird in this way. There is a certain Yankee practicality to the whole thing, and a certain rustic simplicity, but it is delivered by a roguish storyteller. If you trust him all the time, and don't use him as "good to think with," then you are probably missing out on a lot.

On the other hand, no one is obliged to spend any time with any of it.

I do like using the concept of narratives in thinking through these issues. I agree that Mormonism as a community has had an evolving narrative, just like any other human community. But that doesn’t change the fundamental claim of the organization that it is a unique organization that possesses divine authority that every other human community lacks. That claim has remained a constant.

I left pre-internet, so what happened to me wasn’t a technological change. But it was access to some data that I hadn’t had access to before. I wouldn’t describe it as scrambling the narrative, but as contradicting the narrative. I would describe the experience as opposite to that of Q-anon folks. I hadn’t discovered a new truth. I lost the only truth I thought I had. I didn’t feel enlightened. I felt empty and lost.

Ah, OK. Well, yes, I apologize for the assumption. I would say I went through my first stage of disaffiliation without the internet. Still, I feel like I adopted internet disaffiliation just by being so thoroughly immersed in the online discussion. What I mean by that, is I feel a kinship with its culture, but I think that I had a sufficiently firm if non-traditional view of Mormonism beforehand that the data dump did not hit me with anything close to the force that it may have hit "Chapel Mormons" who had their assumption challenged for the first time online.

I can understand the feeling of emptiness and lostness. I have certainly been there. What makes me feel less empty and lost is a choice to wear the narratives more lightly than I did in the past. That's my strategy. I can see why the LDS Church claims to be the only organization that possesses divine authority, and I really feel no need to engage in an argument over that. After all, I am not sure what that amounts to in the end. I doubt anyone really does. They may believe they do. They may live as if they do. But, do they? I doubt it. So, I am not going to get tied up in knots over it.

Your accommodation with the world is quite different from mine, but we have similar enough experiences and dissimilar enough experiences (a great balance between the two) to make every interaction valuable to me.

I have no opinion on the CES letter. I’m not the target audience. I think you raise a question that I’ve personally wrestled with: when arguing that a narrative is false, is there an obligation to present an alternative narrative to replace it? My zone leaders made a similar argument to me as a reason not to reject the church — I had no better alternative in mind. I wasn’t persuaded. But I also have never tried to persuade LDS friends or family to leave the church. I think that’s in part because I don’t claim to have a substitute narrative that I can claim will be better for them.

I really enjoy the fact that, even though I may not agree, you always affect how I think about whatever it is we are discussing.

Oh, I don't think Jeremy Runnells has any obligation to replace the LDS narrative, at all. It is enough for me to know that he has none. It is easy to blow apart narratives if you just approach them from a completely different perspective. I think of the faith narratives learned in youth as something like a first language. Once you have acquired the means of tapping into that discourse, you are indelibly shaped by it. You may choose to acquire and exclusively use a different language, but the initial imprint is always there. I don't think it absolutely determines a person's future in every way, but it will always inflect outcomes. My choice is to accept my Mormon-ness and move forward with it in a positive way. I know there are many other possibilities, and everyone must choose for themselves. My participation here comes from my choice. What I hope we all do is something I struggle with every day: not let our assumptions and limited views completely define our perceptions of others.

[Res Ipsa]

Thank you, Reverend, for such a thoughtful response. You have a nuanced approach to religion in general and Mormonism (big tent) in particular that I respect.

Thank you for your thoughtful reply, RI. You are one of my favorite interlocutors on the board. You always bring challenging arguments and worthwhile perspectives to the table.

I agree with your Ponzi scheme example. But I think it’s at one extreme of a spectrum. At the other extreme would probably be God, who makes no direct claims about their nature. Between those two extremes are claims based on some combination of objective evidence and subjective evaluation. Juries have to decide whether representations are false every day based on this combination of objective and subjective. The COJCOLDS makes a large number of factual claims for which evidence is relevant. I agree that subjective judgment is involved to some degree, but, in my opinion, attributing a member’s rejection of the organization entirely to the member’s expectations ignores the fact that the organization sets some of those expectations by its representations about what it is.

So, in my view, the LDS Church has problems that spring out of the time of its creation. It is a modern phenomenon, and it has a materialist cosmology. Ergo, it is kind of up the creek without a paddle because it asks people to believe historical claims as literally true in the physical world, while at the same time saying that God is intervening in the world in ways that materialists don't generally accept unless they could be proven with hard evidence.

Yes! I think that's a very insightful diagnosis of the problem.

It is a quandary. And, I think that one could say that, in a narrow sense, Mormonism is a "fraud" according to your definition because of this problem.

Thanks. And that's the sense in which I was using the word.

Think of the affidavits that constitute the witness statements for the plates. To my eyes, these are completely absurd documents. They are so far from being persuasive in any meaningful sense, and yet apologists defend them at face value. The arguments made in favor of them go no further than the internal rhetoric of the documents themselves. One is asked to believe that all one needs is trust in the honor of the witness to accept the witness as factually accurate.

Who actually believes anything like that today?

Motivated reasoners. Treating the statement of the witnesses as definitive evidence while ignoring sworn affidavits of other witnesses who contradict Smith's claims is the part that I find absolutely absurd.

I think that Bushman was a lot closer to the truth when he focused on Mormons' personal experience of the narrative. Another way of putting this would be to acknowledge that we are talking about living the myth, but unfortunately people devalue and denigrate myth, when it is a perfectly useful word. I am happy to accept that someone can sincerely believe their experience, and I may even choose to join them in that experience, but I do not feel obliged to accept their experience as something that defines the world for everyone.

The Book of Mormon is a document that applies the myth of Israel, as seen through a Christian lens, as a means of uniting people who belong to different cultures. In doing so, it proposes a new, and quite alien etiology for the indigenous peoples of America, but it does, to Smith's credit, in my view, challenge the innate superiority of European civilization and incorporate elements of native belief and thought.

At the end of the day, it is a myth. It has to be a myth. What I don't think it is, however, is a fraud in the sense of a criminal enterprise. If you stick to a narrow sense of "not being what it purports to be" in terms contemporary to us, then, yes, one might call it a fraud. I just find the word to be unnecessarily prejudicial, much like the word cult.

I think we both accept the proposition that people can find truth in narratives that are not literally true. In fact, I think consistency requires me to do so. If you will indulge a short detour...

Another thread is discussing constructivism -- the proposition that we individually construct our own realities. My gloss on that would be that our brains construct the reality -- we don't consciously do so. I would have described myself as a constructivist at one time. But I think I've become more of a constructionist. (I didn't even know there was such a school of thought until yesterday.) Constructionism posits that humans construct reality through negotiations with others. I think that is consistent with your description of what is commonly referred to as lived experience. In constructionism, lived experience is the basis of the negotiation that creates reality within a community.

If I actually am a constructionist, I don't think I can ignore the lived experience of Joseph Smith and his followers. Smith founded a community that negotiated a different reality within that community. Whatever word we use to describe it (I think your use of myth is a good choice), people find truth within that reality, regardless of what I think about how it maps to objective reality. I don't think that the organization is a criminal enterprise, either. Regardless of Smith's intent, it's another chapter in a long history of humans trying to figure out their place in the universe. And I think that is an important part of trying to figure out what it means to be human.

I think that puts us at least in the same ballpark.

I’m not sure I understand. Even if you focus on one partner, that partner’s reactions will be a product of the interactions between two people, both of whom are directly impacted by the actions of the other. The nature of that interaction is different than the interaction between a person and a relatively static bureaucratic organization.

Yeah, maybe we aren't going to make any headway on this point. I am happy to drop it. We may just have different ideas about what constitutes a useful analogy. I am fine with being more selective in how I employ an analogy. My point is about likening personal conversion to a marriage. I think it is possible to consider going through falling in and out of love, with the concomitant formal commitment and its severance, at least as an analogy, to converting to and away from a religion. There is a subjective element to both that has a lot to do with one's changing internal attitudes and perspective through the life of the relationship.

Fair enough.

The resurrection of Jesus is a factual claim to which evidence applies. That evidence is not accessible to us because of differences in culture and technology and the passage of time. But that doesn’t make it a different kind of question than “Does Res Ipsa own a blue BMW?” (He doesn’t.)

I am not sure that is true. Miracles and paradoxes occupy their own place in the history of Western thought. There is nothing paradoxical about your owning of a blue BMW. Nor would such a fact have ever entered into a special category or genre in ancient literature. Not so with things like coming back from the dead. The treatment of such things in antiquity was a lot more rich, nuanced, and complex. It kind of depended on the context.

The context around the resurrection is one miracle or paradox after another. Clearly, the world is not working in a normal way around and in Jesus, so I don't find it useful to compare his resurrection with your ownership of a blue BMW at all.

I think we're in kind of a thicket it is easy to get lost in. I would agree that the world is not working in a normal way in the stories told about Jesus. But, unless I am willing to deny the existence of objective reality, I think I have to take the position that the question of whether Jesus was resurrected could be resolved had a surveillance camera been mounted in his tomb. To me, it's an issue of the availability of evidence, not a qualitative difference in the nature of the two questions.

Unless you reject the notion of objective reality, Jesus was either resurrected or he wasn’t. The claim he was is either objectively true or false. That we have little relevant evidence accessible to us doesn’t change the nature of the claim.

I don't reject the notion of objective reality. I believe it has its place. It is just not the only place.

Sure. But isn't a consequence of accepting objective reality a recognition that that the two questions do not differ in kind? Both are claims of fact that are capable of evaluation through objective evidence. I don't understand how the availability of evidence changes the nature of the question.

There is more accessible evidence that bears on the COJCOLDS’s factual claim that it is the one and only restored church of Jesus Christ. That does make Smith’s credibility as a reliable narrator relevant, as he is the source of the claim. When all evidence is taken into account, he simply isn’t. Moreover, the absence of evidence that Jesus Christ organized a church, let alone one that resembles the COJCOLDS, weighs very heavily against the COJCOLDS’s foundational claim about itself. Again, the claim isn’t subjective — it is either objectively true or it isn’t.

I couldn't disagree more. Honestly, I just don't know how one measures such a claim. There are too many unknown variables in that one.

The same way that a historian would examine a claim that the U.S. Senate is a "restoration" of the historical Roman Senate.

The COJCOLDS differs significantly from almost every other Christian sect in its specific claims about its own nature. That makes them subject to evaluation based on evidence in a way that strictly faith based claims are not.

I view that to be its outdated rhetorical pose. Whether it can or will move beyond it, or just die, remains to be seen.

From the perspective as an outsider, I think that's a reasonable opinion. But it's not what the organization claimed when it was founded or claims today. It was a factual claim by Smith and the organization has never retracted that claim. I haven't attended Sunday School for a while, but isn't the First Vision taught as an actual historical event? When Smith first made the claim, did he experience it "rhetorical prose" or "factual claim?" What about his followers?

Outside of the realms of formal logic-based systems, the notion of provable is meaningless without some sort of standard. If we apply the standard of more probable than not, there is nothing unreasonable or irrational about stating that the evidence shows it is more probable than not that the COJCOLDS’s fundamental claim about its own nature is false than it is true. It’s no different than the hundreds of assessments we make about various claims every day. Maybe it’s possible to make a case that evaluation of the church’s claims about itself are qualitatively different without special pleading, but I’m skeptical.

The miraculous and paradoxical are by nature on the unlikely end of the spectrum. It makes them resistant to probability arguments with those who accept and stick by miraculous and/or paradoxical claims.

Okay. I think that exchange points us towards a fundamental point of disagreement. In my thinking, "Joseph Smith had a vision of God and Jesus" is a supernatural claim that is qualitatively different than the factual claim "Joseph Smith found a set of golden plates buried in the Hill Cumorah." There is no reason to expect that, were I standing beside Smith with a video camera, the vision would be visible to me or my camera. That, in my opinion, is a purely subjective claim that, short of recantation by Smith, is outside the realm of objective evidence. But there is every reason to expect that, if Smith actually found plates, that they would be visible to me and my camera.

I'm arguing that the church's claim about its nature is a factual question that can be separated from the means by which the claimed restoration took place. If Jesus actually established a church, it could be restored by the discovery of an ancient document that described both his establishment of a church and the details of its nature. In other words, while the claim that Smith had a vision outside the realm of objective evidence, the claim that the COJCOLDS is a restoration of a church founded by Christ is a factual claim capable of resolution through objective evidence. But I'm also testing that argument, so, please, have at it.

I disagree with your framing of the process. The expectations of what it means to live by faith are set by the church itself. It’s one thing to teach that faith is the evidence of things not seen. It’s another to require in practice a belief that is contrary to things seen. I don’t the problem is that members don’t understand faith. I think it’s the organization’s failure to meet the expectations that it sets that leads people to disaffiliate and others to join fringe Mormon groups. Faithful members don’t form their understanding of what it means to live by faith in a vacuum.

OK. Yes, my framing is very different. I tend to think it is more accurate to say that faith is the evidence of experience. The Book of Mormon uses sight less than taste in its most eloquent discussion of faith (Alma). Perhaps it would be better for the LDS Church, especially its leaders and thinkers, to develop that concept a little more fully. I do think both the members and the Church itself struggle to understand the Book of Mormon's definition of faith. Maybe the Church would do a better job of matching member expectations if they put more thought into what the Book of Mormon has to say on this issue. Because, you are right, frustrated expectations does lead its people to affiliate with fringe groups or disaffiliate altogether.

I don't understand the phrase "faith is the evidence of experience." Could you elaborate?

I don’t equate “true” with “good” or “false” with “bad”. I don’t see any necessary connection. So, I agree that Smith’s character or sincerity is irrelevant to whether their organization he founded is “good” or “bad.” (I think it has had both good and bad effects over time.) On the other hand, Smith’s status as a reliable narrator is very relevant to the organization’s fundamental claim about itself.

Sure! Yes. And, he has some real problems there. But, he also fits within certain types of the divine revelator that are found all over the place in myth. Trying to nail down Smith is like trying to catch Silenus, Proteus, or Picus and Faunus. The apparently fraudulent is regularly mixed in with divine truth. People naturally desire to have clearcut answers, and they can be lured in by the promise of them. But sometimes the answers don't come in neat, digestible packages. Mormonism is weird in this way. There is a certain Yankee practicality to the whole thing, and a certain rustic simplicity, but it is delivered by a roguish storyteller. If you trust him all the time, and don't use him as "good to think with," then you are probably missing out on a lot.

On the other hand, no one is obliged to spend any time with any of it.

I think I've gotten pretty used to not having clear cut answers. I'm happy with probabilistic assessments of factual claims. That's the realm where I spend lots of time (more probable than not, beyond reasonable doubt, etc.).

I do like using the concept of narratives in thinking through these issues. I agree that Mormonism as a community has had an evolving narrative, just like any other human community. But that doesn’t change the fundamental claim of the organization that it is a unique organization that possesses divine authority that every other human community lacks. That claim has remained a constant.

I left pre-internet, so what happened to me wasn’t a technological change. But it was access to some data that I hadn’t had access to before. I wouldn’t describe it as scrambling the narrative, but as contradicting the narrative. I would describe the experience as opposite to that of Q-anon folks. I hadn’t discovered a new truth. I lost the only truth I thought I had. I didn’t feel enlightened. I felt empty and lost.

Ah, OK. Well, yes, I apologize for the assumption. I would say I went through my first stage of disaffiliation without the internet. Still, I feel like I adopted internet disaffiliation just by being so thoroughly immersed in the online discussion. What I mean by that, is I feel a kinship with its culture, but I think that I had a sufficiently firm if non-traditional view of Mormonism beforehand that the data dump did not hit me with anything close to the force that it may have hit "Chapel Mormons" who had their assumption challenged for the first time online.

No apology necessary. It was a reasonable assumption. It's a matter of the volume of additional evidence and the ability to converse with others in a similar position.

I can understand the feeling of emptiness and lostness. I have certainly been there. What makes me feel less empty and lost is a choice to wear the narratives more lightly than I did in the past. That's my strategy. I can see why the LDS Church claims to be the only organization that possesses divine authority, and I really feel no need to engage in an argument over that. After all, I am not sure what that amounts to in the end. I doubt anyone really does. They may believe they do. They may live as if they do. But, do they? I doubt it. So, I am not going to get tied up in knots over it.

Your accommodation with the world is quite different from mine, but we have similar enough experiences and dissimilar enough experiences (a great balance between the two) to make every interaction valuable to me.

I like your description "accommodation with the world," as it gets at something fundamental that we have in common. We all have to accommodate with the world. in my opinion, that's especially hard today because of the sheer volume of new information and the high rate of change that our poor brains have to cope with. It's a good reminder that we are engaged in something that is hard and that, when it comes to how we accommodate, cutting each other a little more slack may be a good idea.

I have no opinion on the CES letter. I’m not the target audience. I think you raise a question that I’ve personally wrestled with: when arguing that a narrative is false, is there an obligation to present an alternative narrative to replace it? My zone leaders made a similar argument to me as a reason not to reject the church — I had no better alternative in mind. I wasn’t persuaded. But I also have never tried to persuade LDS friends or family to leave the church. I think that’s in part because I don’t claim to have a substitute narrative that I can claim will be better for them.

I really enjoy the fact that, even though I may not agree, you always affect how I think about whatever it is we are discussing.

Oh, I don't think Jeremy Runnells has any obligation to replace the LDS narrative, at all. It is enough for me to know that he has none. It is easy to blow apart narratives if you just approach them from a completely different perspective. I think of the faith narratives learned in youth as something like a first language. Once you have acquired the means of tapping into that discourse, you are indelibly shaped by it. You may choose to acquire and exclusively use a different language, but the initial imprint is always there. I don't think it absolutely determines a person's future in every way, but it will always inflect outcomes. My choice is to accept my Mormon-ness and move forward with it in a positive way. I know there are many other possibilities, and everyone must choose for themselves. My participation here comes from my choice. What I hope we all do is something I struggle with every day: not let our assumptions and limited views completely define our perceptions of others.

Well said.