A recent r/exmormon post asked a question that comes up often in discussions of Mormonism: if senior leaders know about the historical problems surrounding Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, polygamy, translation, and other controversial subjects, why would they spend the rest of their lives defending the Church?[1]
The question is valid because the men at the top of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are not generally isolated from the institution they lead. Apostles serve full-time for the remainder of their lives, and the Church describes the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve as prophets, seers, revelators, and the body authorized to declare doctrine and establish policy.[2]
But the question contains an assumption that should be separated from the evidence.
We have good reason to believe senior leaders know that many difficult historical issues exist. We do not have good evidence that they privately believe the Church is false.
Those are two very different claims.
The Reddit discussion produced several explanations. Some commenters answered with money, power, or prestige. Others thought the leaders are sincere believers.
One commenter, individual-wave-3746, wrote:
A third, negative_60, argued that status may matter more than money:
Those explanations are not mutually exclusive. A person can sincerely believe something while also benefiting socially, financially, or psychologically from continuing to believe it.
They know about the issues. That does not mean they accept the critics’ conclusions.
It is difficult to maintain that the highest Church leadership is simply unaware of the major controversies.
The Church’s Gospel Topics Essays cover multiple First Vision accounts, Book of Mormon translation, DNA, plural marriage, race and the priesthood, and the translation and historicity of the Book of Abraham. [3] When the essay series was completed, Church Newsroom said the essays had been prepared through extensive research and “carefully reviewed” by members of the First Presidency, the Twelve, and other leaders.[4]
While this does not prove that every apostle has personally studied every archival source behind every issue, it makes complete ignorance an inadequate explanation.
The more important distinction is what happens after the facts are encountered.
A believer can accept that Joseph Smith practiced plural marriage without concluding he was a fraud. He can accept that the Book of Abraham papyri create serious translation questions and still believe Joseph received revelation. He can recognize differences among First Vision accounts and understand them as variations in retelling rather than evidence that the event was invented.
Whether those explanations are persuasive is a separate question. The point is that exposure to evidence does not mechanically produce one conclusion, and The Church has explicitly taught a framework for doing this.
In his 2019 BYU devotional “Stand Forever,” General Authority Seventy Lawrence E. Corbridge divided religious questions into “primary” and “secondary” questions. His primary questions included whether Joseph Smith was a prophet and whether the Church is God’s kingdom. His secondary questions included Church history, polygamy, race and the priesthood, Book of Mormon translation, the Pearl of Great Price, DNA, and differing First Vision accounts.[5]
Corbridge said:
Lucifer’s Lantern has previously examined the problems with that approach in “Stand Forever: A Response.”[6] But Corbridge’s talk is useful here because it shows, in unusually direct terms, how a committed leader can know critical issues exist and still subordinate them to a conclusion reached through spiritual experience.
The original post emphasizes that many Church leaders are intelligent and professionally accomplished. That does not remove the possibility of motivated reasoning.
Psychologist Ziva Kunda’s review of research on motivated reasoning found that people are more likely to arrive at conclusions they want to reach when they can construct explanations that seem reasonable to them.[7] The process is not simply conscious dishonesty. People can sincerely evaluate evidence while giving more weight to interpretations that protect a conclusion they are already motivated to preserve.
That matters in a religious setting because the conclusion is rarely just an abstract proposition.
For a lifelong Church leader, Mormonism may be tied to family relationships, marriage, friendships, career, community, moral identity, memories, and decades of experiences interpreted as revelation.
Church teaching supplies a way to interpret those experiences. Boyd K. Packer taught that guidance from the Holy Ghost comes “as thoughts, as feelings, through impressions and promptings.”[8] Russell M. Nelson described praying for revelation as an apostle and giving thanks when the Lord spoke to his “heart and mind.” He also described meetings of the First Presidency and Twelve as “rooms of revelation.”[9]
A critic may interpret those experiences as intuition, emotion, group dynamics, or confirmation. A believer may interpret the same experiences as God communicating through the Holy Ghost.
That difference can survive exposure to the same historical evidence.
The feedback loop may strengthen it
The observation from polyGAMEistNetwork is worth taking seriously as a hypothesis, even though a Reddit comment cannot tell us what happens inside every apostle’s mind.
A leader feels prompted to include a particular thought in a talk. He delivers it. Afterward, someone tells him that the message answered a prayer or gave precisely the guidance needed.
From the believer’s perspective, that is evidence that the impression really came from God.
Now repeat the cycle for years.
Feeling inspired leads to speaking. Speaking leads to members reporting spiritual confirmation. Their confirmation reinforces the leader’s confidence that his initial feeling was inspiration.
Nothing in that cycle requires deliberate fraud.
There is also a selection effect built into Church leadership.
The Church does not choose fifteen random members and then test whether they can remain believers. Apostles are selected from people who have remained active, trusted, and committed enough to reach the highest levels of Church leadership. The General Handbook says apostles then serve full-time for the remainder of their lives.[2]
Anyone who encounters Church history at 35, concludes Mormonism is false, and resigns has removed himself from that future pool.
Someone who encounters the same material, develops an explanation that preserves belief, and continues serving remains eligible.
Over decades, the process naturally favors people capable of maintaining confidence in the institution. Their continued belief is not surprising despite the selection process. It is partly what the process selects for.
B. H. Roberts offers a useful historical case because we do not have to guess whether he encountered difficult Book of Mormon questions.
As a General Authority and historian, Roberts prepared extensive studies in the early 1920s addressing linguistic, archaeological, cultural, and origin questions surrounding the Book of Mormon. His work considered whether ideas available in Joseph Smith’s environment, including Ethan Smith’s View of the Hebrews, could provide material for a naturalistic explanation of the book.[10]
The surviving record has produced disagreement about Roberts’s private conclusions. Brigham Madsen argued that the studies raise serious questions about his later belief, while Thomas Alexander noted that the matter may never be conclusively resolved.[10][11]
Roberts himself warned in a 1923 letter that the material did “not represent any conclusions of mine” and said his purpose was to ensure Church leaders knew the arguments “pro and con.” He described his faith in the Book of Mormon as “unshaken” and “unshakeable.”[12]
Whatever Roberts privately thought, the case demonstrates something narrower and more defensible: a senior Church leader could engage deeply with evidence critics regarded as devastating and continue publicly defending the faith.
That is exactly the possibility the Reddit question needs to allow for.
Money cannot simply be dismissed. The Church acknowledges that General Authorities receive a uniform living allowance after leaving their careers for full-time Church service. It says the allowance comes from investment proceeds rather than tithing.[13]
But the existence of compensation does not establish that money explains an individual leader’s belief or continued service.
Status is harder to quantify but may be more psychologically powerful. Apostles are officially sustained as prophets, seers, and revelators and described as special witnesses of Jesus Christ.[2] Members quote their talks, seek their counsel, and may interpret encounters with them in spiritual terms.
That environment could reward someone who privately doubts. It could just as plausibly reinforce someone who sincerely believes.
Research on escalation of commitment shows that people can increase commitment to prior decisions even after negative information, in part through self-justification. Experiments have also found that psychological connection to another decision-maker can produce vicarious escalation of commitment.[14]
It would be irresponsible to diagnose an apostle from a psychology paper. But the research makes one point clear: human beings do not always respond to contrary evidence by neutrally resetting every prior commitment.
For an elderly apostle, reconsidering Mormonism could involve far more than changing an opinion about Joseph Smith. It could require reevaluating decades of spiritual experiences, family decisions, public testimony, institutional service, and counsel given to millions of people.
That is an enormous psychological cost.
The middle ground is probably larger than we think
Either an apostle believes every traditional LDS claim exactly as an ordinary member understands it, or he knows Mormonism is a fraud and keeps the deception going.
There is a wide range between those positions.
A leader could believe Joseph Smith was genuinely called by God while also believing Joseph made serious mistakes. He could consider some traditional historical assumptions too simplistic. He could believe past leaders were wrong about particular doctrines or policies. He could find some apologetic arguments weak while continuing to believe his own spiritual experiences establish the Church’s divine authority.
From outside the faith, that may look like rationalization.
From inside it, it may feel like mature belief.
We cannot establish which description best fits any particular apostle without evidence from that person.
The evidence supports a more restrained answer than either “they know it is true” or “they know it is a scam.”
Senior Church leaders are demonstrably aware, at least institutionally, of many difficult historical issues.[3][4] The Church also teaches interpretive frameworks that allow those issues to coexist with a prior spiritual conviction.[5] Psychology gives us well-established reasons that identity, motivated reasoning, self-justification, and prior commitment can influence how people evaluate threatening evidence.[7][14]
Money and status may reinforce continued participation, but neither proves conscious deception.[2][13]
Some leaders may privately doubt more than others. Some may understand Mormon truth claims differently from ordinary members. Some may have confronted certain historical questions only superficially. We do not know.
What we should not do is turn that uncertainty into certainty and declare that the men at the top secretly agree with the critics.
Their continued service is not evidence that Mormonism must be true. Their knowledge of difficult history is not proof that they are knowingly operating a fraud.
Human belief is messier than either conclusion.
You do not need fifteen evil masterminds knowingly deceiving the world.. You just need fifteen human beings who are extremely good at believing themselves.
[1] ImportantPerformer16, “If these leaders know the Church is false, why would they dedicate their entire finite lives to it?” r/exmormon, Reddit.
[2] The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, General Handbook, §5.1.1.1, “First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.”
[3] The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Gospel Topics Essays.”
[4] The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “New Essays Address Topics on Women, Priesthood, Mother in Heaven,” Church Newsroom.
[5] Lawrence E. Corbridge, “Stand Forever,” BYU Speeches.
[6] Lucifer’s Lantern, “Stand Forever: A Response.”
[7] Ziva Kunda, “The Case for Motivated Reasoning,” Psychological Bulletin 108, no. 3 (1990): 480-498.
[8] Boyd K. Packer, “Revelation in a Changing World,” General Conference, October 1989.
[9] Russell M. Nelson, “Revelation for the Church, Revelation for Our Lives,” General Conference, April 2018.
[10] Brigham D. Madsen, “B. H. Roberts’s Studies of the Book of Mormon,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 26, no. 3 (1993).
[11] Thomas G. Alexander, “B. H. Roberts and the Book of Mormon: Studies of the Book of Mormon,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought.
[12] Truman G. Madsen, “B. H. Roberts and the Book of Mormon,” BYU Studies 19, no. 4 (1979).
[13] The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Do General Authorities Get Paid?” Church FAQ.
[14] Brian C. Gunia, Niro Sivanathan, and Adam D. Galinsky, “Vicarious Entrapment: Your Sunk Costs, My Escalation of Commitment,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45, no. 6 (2009): 1238-1244.
If these leaders know the Church is false, why would they dedicate their entire finite lives to it?
by u/ImportantPerformer16 in exmormon
The question is valid because the men at the top of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are not generally isolated from the institution they lead. Apostles serve full-time for the remainder of their lives, and the Church describes the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve as prophets, seers, revelators, and the body authorized to declare doctrine and establish policy.[2]
But the question contains an assumption that should be separated from the evidence.
We have good reason to believe senior leaders know that many difficult historical issues exist. We do not have good evidence that they privately believe the Church is false.
Those are two very different claims.
What the commenters thought
The Reddit discussion produced several explanations. Some commenters answered with money, power, or prestige. Others thought the leaders are sincere believers.
One commenter, individual-wave-3746, wrote:
I think it’s a cynical take to assume they aren’t true believers. The human mind will rationalize away anything.[1]Another, polyGAMEistNetwork, focused on the feedback senior leaders receive after speaking:
After every talk at every stake conference they have people line up to tell them they ‘answered their prayers’ or ‘brought the spirit to their hearts’ etc.[1]
A third, negative_60, argued that status may matter more than money:
Most of the answers are forgetting the one thing that Church leadership offers that leaders can't get anywhere else: status.[1]Other commenters pointed to cognitive dissonance, sunk costs, childhood religious formation, and institutional loyalty. Some argued that senior leaders may know less detailed history than critics assume.[1]
Those explanations are not mutually exclusive. A person can sincerely believe something while also benefiting socially, financially, or psychologically from continuing to believe it.
They know about the issues. That does not mean they accept the critics’ conclusions.
It is difficult to maintain that the highest Church leadership is simply unaware of the major controversies.
The Church’s Gospel Topics Essays cover multiple First Vision accounts, Book of Mormon translation, DNA, plural marriage, race and the priesthood, and the translation and historicity of the Book of Abraham. [3] When the essay series was completed, Church Newsroom said the essays had been prepared through extensive research and “carefully reviewed” by members of the First Presidency, the Twelve, and other leaders.[4]
While this does not prove that every apostle has personally studied every archival source behind every issue, it makes complete ignorance an inadequate explanation.
The more important distinction is what happens after the facts are encountered.
A believer can accept that Joseph Smith practiced plural marriage without concluding he was a fraud. He can accept that the Book of Abraham papyri create serious translation questions and still believe Joseph received revelation. He can recognize differences among First Vision accounts and understand them as variations in retelling rather than evidence that the event was invented.
Whether those explanations are persuasive is a separate question. The point is that exposure to evidence does not mechanically produce one conclusion, and The Church has explicitly taught a framework for doing this.
In his 2019 BYU devotional “Stand Forever,” General Authority Seventy Lawrence E. Corbridge divided religious questions into “primary” and “secondary” questions. His primary questions included whether Joseph Smith was a prophet and whether the Church is God’s kingdom. His secondary questions included Church history, polygamy, race and the priesthood, Book of Mormon translation, the Pearl of Great Price, DNA, and differing First Vision accounts.[5]
Corbridge said:
If you answer the primary questions, the secondary questions get answered too, or they pale in significance.[5]
Lucifer’s Lantern has previously examined the problems with that approach in “Stand Forever: A Response.”[6] But Corbridge’s talk is useful here because it shows, in unusually direct terms, how a committed leader can know critical issues exist and still subordinate them to a conclusion reached through spiritual experience.
Motivated reasoning does not require stupidity
The original post emphasizes that many Church leaders are intelligent and professionally accomplished. That does not remove the possibility of motivated reasoning.
Psychologist Ziva Kunda’s review of research on motivated reasoning found that people are more likely to arrive at conclusions they want to reach when they can construct explanations that seem reasonable to them.[7] The process is not simply conscious dishonesty. People can sincerely evaluate evidence while giving more weight to interpretations that protect a conclusion they are already motivated to preserve.
That matters in a religious setting because the conclusion is rarely just an abstract proposition.
For a lifelong Church leader, Mormonism may be tied to family relationships, marriage, friendships, career, community, moral identity, memories, and decades of experiences interpreted as revelation.
Church teaching supplies a way to interpret those experiences. Boyd K. Packer taught that guidance from the Holy Ghost comes “as thoughts, as feelings, through impressions and promptings.”[8] Russell M. Nelson described praying for revelation as an apostle and giving thanks when the Lord spoke to his “heart and mind.” He also described meetings of the First Presidency and Twelve as “rooms of revelation.”[9]
A critic may interpret those experiences as intuition, emotion, group dynamics, or confirmation. A believer may interpret the same experiences as God communicating through the Holy Ghost.
That difference can survive exposure to the same historical evidence.
The feedback loop may strengthen it
The observation from polyGAMEistNetwork is worth taking seriously as a hypothesis, even though a Reddit comment cannot tell us what happens inside every apostle’s mind.
Imagine the sequence.
A leader feels prompted to include a particular thought in a talk. He delivers it. Afterward, someone tells him that the message answered a prayer or gave precisely the guidance needed.
From the believer’s perspective, that is evidence that the impression really came from God.
Now repeat the cycle for years.
Feeling inspired leads to speaking. Speaking leads to members reporting spiritual confirmation. Their confirmation reinforces the leader’s confidence that his initial feeling was inspiration.
Nothing in that cycle requires deliberate fraud.
Selection matters too
There is also a selection effect built into Church leadership.
The Church does not choose fifteen random members and then test whether they can remain believers. Apostles are selected from people who have remained active, trusted, and committed enough to reach the highest levels of Church leadership. The General Handbook says apostles then serve full-time for the remainder of their lives.[2]
Anyone who encounters Church history at 35, concludes Mormonism is false, and resigns has removed himself from that future pool.
Someone who encounters the same material, develops an explanation that preserves belief, and continues serving remains eligible.
Over decades, the process naturally favors people capable of maintaining confidence in the institution. Their continued belief is not surprising despite the selection process. It is partly what the process selects for.
B. H. Roberts
B. H. Roberts offers a useful historical case because we do not have to guess whether he encountered difficult Book of Mormon questions.
As a General Authority and historian, Roberts prepared extensive studies in the early 1920s addressing linguistic, archaeological, cultural, and origin questions surrounding the Book of Mormon. His work considered whether ideas available in Joseph Smith’s environment, including Ethan Smith’s View of the Hebrews, could provide material for a naturalistic explanation of the book.[10]
The surviving record has produced disagreement about Roberts’s private conclusions. Brigham Madsen argued that the studies raise serious questions about his later belief, while Thomas Alexander noted that the matter may never be conclusively resolved.[10][11]
Roberts himself warned in a 1923 letter that the material did “not represent any conclusions of mine” and said his purpose was to ensure Church leaders knew the arguments “pro and con.” He described his faith in the Book of Mormon as “unshaken” and “unshakeable.”[12]
Whatever Roberts privately thought, the case demonstrates something narrower and more defensible: a senior Church leader could engage deeply with evidence critics regarded as devastating and continue publicly defending the faith.
That is exactly the possibility the Reddit question needs to allow for.
What about money and status?
Money cannot simply be dismissed. The Church acknowledges that General Authorities receive a uniform living allowance after leaving their careers for full-time Church service. It says the allowance comes from investment proceeds rather than tithing.[13]
But the existence of compensation does not establish that money explains an individual leader’s belief or continued service.
Status is harder to quantify but may be more psychologically powerful. Apostles are officially sustained as prophets, seers, and revelators and described as special witnesses of Jesus Christ.[2] Members quote their talks, seek their counsel, and may interpret encounters with them in spiritual terms.
That environment could reward someone who privately doubts. It could just as plausibly reinforce someone who sincerely believes.
The same caution applies to sunk costs.
Research on escalation of commitment shows that people can increase commitment to prior decisions even after negative information, in part through self-justification. Experiments have also found that psychological connection to another decision-maker can produce vicarious escalation of commitment.[14]
It would be irresponsible to diagnose an apostle from a psychology paper. But the research makes one point clear: human beings do not always respond to contrary evidence by neutrally resetting every prior commitment.
For an elderly apostle, reconsidering Mormonism could involve far more than changing an opinion about Joseph Smith. It could require reevaluating decades of spiritual experiences, family decisions, public testimony, institutional service, and counsel given to millions of people.
That is an enormous psychological cost.
The middle ground is probably larger than we think
The discussion often assumes only two possibilities.
Either an apostle believes every traditional LDS claim exactly as an ordinary member understands it, or he knows Mormonism is a fraud and keeps the deception going.
There is a wide range between those positions.
A leader could believe Joseph Smith was genuinely called by God while also believing Joseph made serious mistakes. He could consider some traditional historical assumptions too simplistic. He could believe past leaders were wrong about particular doctrines or policies. He could find some apologetic arguments weak while continuing to believe his own spiritual experiences establish the Church’s divine authority.
From outside the faith, that may look like rationalization.
From inside it, it may feel like mature belief.
We cannot establish which description best fits any particular apostle without evidence from that person.
So why do they stay?
The evidence supports a more restrained answer than either “they know it is true” or “they know it is a scam.”
Senior Church leaders are demonstrably aware, at least institutionally, of many difficult historical issues.[3][4] The Church also teaches interpretive frameworks that allow those issues to coexist with a prior spiritual conviction.[5] Psychology gives us well-established reasons that identity, motivated reasoning, self-justification, and prior commitment can influence how people evaluate threatening evidence.[7][14]
Money and status may reinforce continued participation, but neither proves conscious deception.[2][13]
Some leaders may privately doubt more than others. Some may understand Mormon truth claims differently from ordinary members. Some may have confronted certain historical questions only superficially. We do not know.
What we should not do is turn that uncertainty into certainty and declare that the men at the top secretly agree with the critics.
Their continued service is not evidence that Mormonism must be true. Their knowledge of difficult history is not proof that they are knowingly operating a fraud.
Human belief is messier than either conclusion.
You do not need fifteen evil masterminds knowingly deceiving the world.. You just need fifteen human beings who are extremely good at believing themselves.
Sources
[1] ImportantPerformer16, “If these leaders know the Church is false, why would they dedicate their entire finite lives to it?” r/exmormon, Reddit.
[2] The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, General Handbook, §5.1.1.1, “First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.”
[3] The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Gospel Topics Essays.”
[4] The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “New Essays Address Topics on Women, Priesthood, Mother in Heaven,” Church Newsroom.
[5] Lawrence E. Corbridge, “Stand Forever,” BYU Speeches.
[6] Lucifer’s Lantern, “Stand Forever: A Response.”
[7] Ziva Kunda, “The Case for Motivated Reasoning,” Psychological Bulletin 108, no. 3 (1990): 480-498.
[8] Boyd K. Packer, “Revelation in a Changing World,” General Conference, October 1989.
[9] Russell M. Nelson, “Revelation for the Church, Revelation for Our Lives,” General Conference, April 2018.
[10] Brigham D. Madsen, “B. H. Roberts’s Studies of the Book of Mormon,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 26, no. 3 (1993).
[11] Thomas G. Alexander, “B. H. Roberts and the Book of Mormon: Studies of the Book of Mormon,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought.
[12] Truman G. Madsen, “B. H. Roberts and the Book of Mormon,” BYU Studies 19, no. 4 (1979).
[13] The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Do General Authorities Get Paid?” Church FAQ.
[14] Brian C. Gunia, Niro Sivanathan, and Adam D. Galinsky, “Vicarious Entrapment: Your Sunk Costs, My Escalation of Commitment,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45, no. 6 (2009): 1238-1244.
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