Lucifer's Lantern

The CES Letter started as a simple request for help. In 2012, Jeremy Runnells was struggling with questions about LDS history that he couldn’t reconcile with what he had learned growing up. He had served a mission, gone to BYU, and lived his life inside of Mormonism, but the sources he was reading didn’t line up with the version he’d been taught. When he spoke with a Church Educational System director about it, he was asked to write his concerns in one place so they could review them together. He sat down and did exactly that. He pulled notes, checked references, and laid out the issues in a document that ended up more than eighty pages long. He sent it back expecting a follow-up. The follow-up never came. That unanswered list of questions eventually became known online as the CES Letter. In April 2013, he uploaded the document online under the title “Letter to a CES Director.” The file spread fast because it pulled together problems that members usually encounter one at a time. Runne...

I felt closer to God when I finally stopped believing in Him.  Let me explain. When I was a kid, I’d sit in church and listen to people talk about God as if he was real . I say “he” because God was also defined as a male, and that definition supposedly came from thousands of years of tradition. God was like me : he had feelings or grief and joy; he wanted me to be happy; he had ambition and plans for me, just like I did for myself. What a wonderful thought that a Supreme Being had me in mind! But God was also “He.” I say that because the title implied a king, nobility, and sovereignty. God was not like me : He was omnipotent; He knew better than me; He was always in control; He wasn’t flawed like me; He didn’t make mistakes; He knew the end from the beginning. I couldn’t ultimately know God, but He wanted me to draw close to Him. It's called "the House of the Lord" for a reason, right?   According to the traditions I grew up in, the way we approached God was through “ri...

When you grow up or live inside a system where your sexuality is treated like community property, you end up believing that your body, your desires, and even your curiosity belong to someone else’s judgment. It hits some people early. For others, it doesn’t click until years later, long after sitting in a small office across from a church leader asking questions no one should’ve asked in the first place. And it’s not just teenagers. Adults get caught in the same pattern, feeling obligated to confess things that should’ve stayed personal. I need you to understand this...   Your sex life is nobody’s business .  It's most certainly not the business of the  man holding a calling that makes him your “judge in Israel.” Turning your sexuality into something that needs review and approval doesn’t build integrity. It builds a culture where you learn to monitor yourself through someone else’s expectations. You stop listening to your own sense of right and wrong and start waiting f...

Temple worthiness isn’t just about "good behavior" in Mormon teaching. It’s a gate that determines who qualifies for the highest blessings the religion offers. The church teaches that only people judged worthy can enter the temple, make covenants, and receive the ordinances that lead to exaltation, which is the belief that humans can become like God and live forever with their families in the celestial kingdom.  This makes worthiness interviews a spiritual checkpoint that can shape someone’s identity, their standing in the community, and even their hope for eternity.    Are You Worthy to Enter a Mormon Temple? Are You Worthy of the Mormon Temple? Yes No Restart Enter the Temple

Never has any passage of scripture come with more scrupulosity to the heart of man than Mosiah 3:19 has to me: For the natural man is an enemy to God , and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever… It’s a passage which seemed to enter with great shame into every feeling of my heart. I heard this passage mentioned and quoted again and again - it appears in General Conference addresses a total of 347 times, over half of which occurring in my lifetime (according to the LDS General Conference Corpus ). It’s a passage that implies a divine curse on not just one people group, not on one continent, but on the whole of the human species - an original sin, as it were. Mosiah 3:19 would have you believe that you and I are God’s personal enemies, because we are the posterity of Adam and Eve. Depending on how you read LDS theology, I either did or didn’t have a choice here, a subject too dense to get into just yet; and either way, an omniscient God supposedly laid the groundw...

  In the last article we looked at how Magnalia Christi Americana demonstrates how early Americans saw themselves as a covenant people in a covenant land. To demonstrate how that same worldview shaped Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon, we’re going to walk through the purposes behind both books. Luckily John Higginson spells out the goals of Magnalia in his introduction to Cotton Mather’s work. Once you compare those intentions to the Book of Mormon , the influence is hard to miss. The First Purpose of Magnalia Christi Americana: First, That a plain scriptural duty of recording the works of God unto after-times, may not any longer be omitted, but performed in the best manner we can. ( Magnalia Vol 1, pg 10) Higginson meant this in a very literal way. Puritans worried that if they didn’t record God’s works, their children wouldn’t know how God had acted among them, and the community could lose sight of the guidance they believed God had provided.  Mather builds his entire project...

In Part 1 of this essay miniseries, I laid out how, if we are to believe that the curse of Laman wasn’t not related to skin color - as was the assumption for most of the history of the LDS church - that there is zero evidence for any of it. In other words, all of the "curse" can be explained naturalistically with no divine intervention and therefore no cause for the Nephites to assign one to them. LDS scripture, however, does not stop at describing a Lamanite “curse.” It describes two other divine generational judgments: a “curse of Ham,” and a “curse of Cain.” Here’s the scriptural precedent for both other curses: