This is an archived copy of a post written by Conflict Of Justice (conflictofjustice.com). Used with permission: Conflict Of Justice may not agree with any alterations made.
Like preachers spreading the gospel far and wide, skeptics distribute Antimormon rhetoric to friends, families, and strangers. Usually, we Mormons toss it aside as just another Antimormon screed, but all too often members who are already questioning their faith read it and become convinced that the church is untrue. We defenders of the faith don’t take CES Letter seriously because it sounds like clown college to us. But to a teenager going through the difficulties of life, it could be the breaking point that leads downhill. It is brilliant and convincing propaganda. We need to start taking it seriously.
What Issue Needs Resolved?
Antimormons deface Book of Mormons they find in Marriot hotels with angry scrawls and links to CES Letter:
(from Reddit)
Antimormon rhetoric in general typically touches some life issue that has been festering in the reader’s heart unresolved–possibly for decades–just begging for some justification to sow seeds of doubt. It could be their parents’ divorce, promised blessings that didn’t come to pass, bullying at church–or something increasingly common: a social justice ideology that overtakes and devours faith in the gospel because we don’t allow gay marriage in the temple or whatever.
Cognitive Dissonance – The unresolved issue is a cognitive dissonance that the reader has been unwilling to confront, or as ex-Mormons call it “items on my shelf.” There are three parts to a person’s testimony: intellect, heart, and spirit, and all three need to be in alignment. If the intellect says one thing and the heart says another, eventually the heart is going to gnaw until the reader must must address it. It must be confronted or the dissonance will lead to fear and contempt. The issue is going to manifest eventually one way or another.
From what I have seen, most doubters use Antimormon rhetoric as justification for leaving a faith that they already hold contempt for. They use it as a way to confront the issue, or–more commonly–use it as a sedative to keep avoiding the personal issue. This only leads to resentment against the church. So it is most important to get to the root of this personal issue. Discuss it in terms of not only logic and intellect, but also emotion, feelings, and spiritual involvement. What really happened to make them feel this way? Why does this particular issue touch a raw nerve?
Some Antimormon invited me to read CES Letter years ago, and I didn’t give it more than a five second glance because I’ve heard all the same arguments before. Who has time to read 84 pages? Who would bother reading a lengthy PDF? Back then, I didn’t think people would notice CES Letter, but obviously I was wrong. Many people have read it. Why? Well, what about someone who hasn’t heard these kind of arguments before? The PDF moves briskly from issue to issue, and effectively the reader enters into a skeptical frame of mind. The litany of issues is like a net, and one of the issues is bound to snag someone’s personal unresolved experience. For example, if I were bullied at church as a kid, I would read about Joseph Smith taking other men’s wives and feel resentment. I would read about the church spending money on a megamall instead of helping poor people and feel even more resentment.
Isolate Personal Issue – So you can usually tell based on which issues the reader talks about what kind of personal issues they need to resolve. It isn’t helpful for them to impress these personal issues onto the church or gospel because then they aren’t really confronting it, so it is important to isolate the personal experience. Disassociate the church and gospel from the discussion and encourage them to talk about their experiences head on. And encourage them to stop projecting the issue onto Mormons. Not everybody has that same issue they do. You should still definitely talk about the gospel concerns–and talk about them in terms of not only intellect, but also emotion and spirit. Just don’t give them an excuse to blame the church for their problems or keep avoiding the issue. Talk about their issues in terms of them.
Consider The Narrative, Not Just Facts
One important thing that Mormon fact-checkers often miss about Antimormon rhetoric in general is that it isn’t so much a matter of giving people correct or incorrect information. The more important thing is the story they tell, leading to a single message. The message hinges on a small handful of narratives, and the narratives is backed up with a progression of sub-narratives. It’s like a tree with a trunk, branches, and smaller branches. CES Letter is full of strawman portrayals that back up a few basic narratives. What are those basic narratives?
With most people, you can’t just debunk the strawman portrayals and expect them to deconstruct the narratives on their own. That takes a lot of thinking. The logical connections need to be addressed and taken all the way to the narratives and overall message. If you just chop away at the leaves, more leaves will grow back. You have to get to the few main branches and the trunk. Like the seed of faith, doubt is a seed that slips in and grows into a large living object with a truck, branches, and twigs.
What Is The Narrative? – So when someone is complaining about Mormon polygamy, how do we determine what the narrative is? It isn’t easy to figure out. You just have to figure out which claims everything else rests on. To me, it looks like there are four overall narratives: Book of Mormon, Book of Abraham, Polygamy, and Cult. The big narratives slip in between those. Often a big narratives will be given near the beginning of a section of text, but not always. When it comes to polygamy in CES Letter, a sentence that really stuck out to me was: “Plural marriages are rooted in the notion of ‘sealing’ for both time and eternity.” I thought: “Wait a second, no they weren’t! Plural marriages weren’t always for both time and eternity! It could be either one or the other.” But the implications of this claim support a bunch of polygamy sub-narratives. We might think: If Joseph Smith practiced plural marriage for both time and eternity, then he was having adulterous physical relations with women married to other men. And so forth. So to me, this claim about marriage for time and eternity is a main branch of the tree and supports a whole bunch of other claims–but also, those other claims bolster this narrative as well.
How To Attack A Big Narrative – So how do you debunk a main narrative? Well, you could attack the narrative at its stem, but then all the sub-narratives are still there supporting it. Or you could start with the sub-narratives and get down to the main branch, but then you risk getting bogged down with the strawman portrayals and not getting anywhere. What I do is find a weak sub-narrative and attack that to get to the main branch, like hacking through twigs and branches to get at a main branch.
For me, one example of a weak sub-narrative is the discussion about Joseph Smith destroying the Nauvoo Expositor newspaper. We might start out thinking Joseph Smith was trying to cover up his polygamous behavior, but then when we actually investigate the evidence, we find out that the newspaper was inciting violence, dehumanizing Mormons, and supporting genocide. This is a weak spot in the Antimormon polygamy narrative, and we can use the same kind of logical progression that Antimormons use to bring it back to the main branch: If polygamists were such bad people, why was it the anti-polygamists appealing to genocide?
The sub-narratives may be easy to debunk, but when you get to the thick branches, those are not so easy to cut through. That’s because the main narratives are often deep-set stories that we have heard all our lives and are unlikely to change our minds about. They have grown thick and strong. Whoever heard of polygamous marriage that was eternity-only or time-only? Well, when you read historical court proceedings, that what everybody is talking about. The DNA evidence that clears Joseph Smith is hard to refute. But few people read historical records. They read Wikipedia. They read mainstream news. History is whatever the historians write, and the historians are perpetuating these big lies. Unfortunately, LDS church apologists are perpetuating the lies as well.
So you have to cut through all that, slowly and methodically, chop after chop. Then you get to the overall message, and that is even thicker and harder to cut down. But it’s a whole lot easier if you already have all the branches cut away.
Develop Emotional & Intellectual Maturity
Even if someone is spiritually mature and has a strong testimony, they might go apostate because of an emotional or intellectual immaturity. As a skeptic talks about their reasons for doubting you can get a sense of what area needs development. Then you can help them develop that specific need. Too many bishops and parents tell doubters “Read the FairMormon article” or “Read the scriptures” or “Pray about it.” It is much more helpful to pinpoint where the immaturity lies and prescribe a specific remedy. If you find that their emotions are weak and leading to illogical and passionate outbursts, maybe they need to watch the film ‘Legacy’ or ‘Saturday’s Warrior’? Maybe they need to read excerpts from History of the Church about the Missouri holocaust that Mormons experienced?
We all know how it feels when we go to someone for help and are dismissed with a generic response that does nothing to help. We don’t feel valued. We don’t feel loved. The other side of this coin is immature people tend to conflate their ‘problems’ to illicit a response and receive buckets of sympathy that they don’t really need, a circus sideshow production that puts the spotlight on them. What they need is to mature. I think the answer is to give them time to talk about the issue and let them know that you understand what they are saying. Repeat to them the issues they had laid out, and get to the roots of it all. Suggest resources that target those specific issues and in the specific emotional, intellectual, or spiritual way that they need. Then check in on them in the future to make sure they are growing and counsel them accordingly.
Cognitive Bias – Sometimes the problem is trauma of personal experience, or even trauma from consistent media or social influences, but usually I find the problem is simple cognitive bias. The skeptic was taught all their life to be tolerant, kind, and accepting of everyone, and then when confronted with some social justice rhetoric they decided the church is intolerant and bigoted, and now nothing will change their mind. Bias is not easy to crack because people don’t want to accept that something they believed their entire lives is wrong. The best thing for cognitive bias is to give them a positive reason to change their minds that will undoubtedly make their lives happier. Often, this is achieved by setting a good example. It is also achieved through an approach of true sincerity where you don’t need to be right all the time yourself. You can give logical reasons and make emotional appeals for years and years, but it won’t make a difference until they decide for themselves the gospel will change their misery into happiness.
I think we in the church believe truth to be pragmatic. Alma 32 basically tells us truth is whatever works, whatever gives us enlightenment. We know a tree is good if its fruit is always good. Skeptics follow pragmatic truth, then, when they leave the church because they see bad results. How could the true church spend more on a megamall than humanitarian aid? That is a question that indicates a lot of immaturity, but still it does follow loose pragmatic reasoning: A good church would be helping the poor as much as it can, right?
An important step here is to delve deeper into what a good tree and bad tree is. A good church helps the poor, yes, but why did Jesus say it was good to use expensive perfumes on him because ‘you will always have the poor among you’? Good organizations aren’t allowed to invest in a mall now? And aren’t there some really bad guys who donate to charity? No bad guy in the history of the world has ever wanted to help poor people? It comes down to the great and spacious building in Lehi’s dream standing opposite the tree of life. It used mockery, ridicule, and aggrandizement to attract followers. All Lehi had was a tree. An awesome building is a much more appealing place to go, but the building is foundationally flawed. The tree naturally knows how to dig its roots in to be solid and strong. To find which tree is good and which is bad you have to carefully judge what exactly good fruit tastes like. A well springing up to eternal life or a good time in an awesome building? Natural fruit juice or a sugary syrupy substitute? Unfortunately, most people party their youths away and spend their lives in empty pursuits until they die filled with regret.
Escaping Mormon Bubble – There is that cliché of someone who hates his community and escapes into the real world, and then discovers that his own community was actually good all along. The prodigal son, Dorothy returning to Kansas, Moana returning to her island, etc. The archetypal hero’s journey is what most skeptics are trying to experience, because they simply want a wider perspective of life. Is the Mormon testimony all there is?
Antimormon rhetoric gets to the basis for what a testimony. morality, and justice is, and what really is. We likewise need to get to the core of these issues and have strong supported answers. Many Mormons still have these primary class answers and have not really explored God’s plan versus Satan’s plan. What is faith? What is knowledge? What is the worldly substitute for faith and knowledge? Where do we see symptoms of these cheap imitations? Many answers for me have come through pondering in the temple and intense scripture study, and by paying close attention to current events. Every community develops an insular bubble and skeptics often feel the weight of this bubble.
The Hymn of the Pearl is a great early Christian text that gives us some understanding of the hero’s journey. A young man is sent on a quest to a foreign land to slay a dragon and return home with a pearl–the dragon representing the wiles of Satan and the pearl representing a true individual testimony. Unexpectedly, he gets seduced into a life of luxury in this foreign land and forgets his quest, until his father sends him a letter as a rude awakening. Many resent this rude awakening and prefer the luxurious life of worldly benefits. But I think deep in each ex-Mormon and skeptic their lies dormant a need to fulfill this life’s quest.
What should this letter from his father the king look like? Should it be a mamsy-pamsy note: “We understand there are many negative things about the church and lots of room for growth, and we respect your decision to go a different path”? Should it be a quick thoughtless letter: “You should read and pray about it.” Or will it be a lengthy letter, a series of letters, that delves into the issues, gets to the root experiences and addresses each narrative in an appropriate way, and provides good positive reinforcement, that expresses deep love and hope yet stern counsel? Just think if you were that king sending a letter to your son or daughter who had gone wayward on their quest to slay the dragon and now was in imminent danger, what letter would you write to your son or daughter? Because that is the letter Heavenly Father is writing through you to this child of God who has gone wayward because of Antimormon rhetoric. That snarky little punk who spits at you for being Mormon is a noble prince who has been carefully chosen to perform a noble quest and discover a great treasure that will benefit the entire community. We should be dutiful in delivering the letter, as they are now in imminent danger. Above all, we should give them the respect and love that they deserves as God’s son or daughter.