---
I want to begin with the martyrs, because you invoke them often and I think you've forgotten what they were actually doing.
Hebrew, Jaredite, and Lehite prophets killed because they were dangerous to entrenched religious and civil power. Jesus, executed by the religious establishment of his own tradition for saying uncomfortable things in public, through unauthorized channels, without going through proper institutional processes. The early saints were driven from their homes for belonging to a movement that existing power structures found threatening. These are not stories about faithful people being attacked by outside enemies. They are stories about what happens when honest truth-speaking collides with institutional self-interest. The martyrdom is real. The lesson being drawn from it is backwards.
You cite these deaths to protect the institution from criticism. But the institution is no longer the vulnerable party Joseph was. You hold the temple recommends. You run the disciplinary councils. You control the financial settlements and the NDAs and the handbook routing that sends abuse reports to lawyers before law enforcement. You have the power. The martyrdom narrative belongs to the people you are disciplining, never to the men doing the disciplining.
A general authority would rationally prefer mockery and editorials to burning at the stake. That tells you something about the rhetorical inflation at work — that critical blog posts and withheld sustaining votes have been placed on a continuum with mob violence. That is not honest with the tradition's own history. It is not honest with the actual power distribution in the room.
---
I understand the instinct to protect the membership from destabilizing information. I want to take that seriously before I challenge it.
Faith communities are real. The belonging, the ordinances, the intergenerational continuity, the framework for meaning-making in grief and crisis — these are not nothing. An institution that helps people bury their dead and raise their children and find each other across the loneliness of modern life is doing something genuinely valuable. I don't want to destroy that. I don't think the people you've excommunicated wanted to destroy it either.
But consider what protecting the membership has come to mean in practice.
It has meant that children were questioned alone by adult men about their sexual lives and behaviors, and when a former bishop, Sam Young, asked formally, faithfully, using every available channel, that this practice stop — he was excommunicated for embarrassing the church. The practice was subsequently changed. His position was correct. He paid with his membership for being right before you were ready to hear it. The protection of the mechanism that silences dissent was valued more highly than the protection of children. I don't think that was the intention. It was the result.
It has meant that Kate Kelly, an activist returned missionary who agitated for women to attend the priesthood session at conference, — and thereby asking the question that is not doctrinally settled in any clean way the historical record can support, given what Joseph himself authorized women to do — was excommunicated for expressing her discipleship. For taking the tradition seriously enough to push on it. For believing the revelation mechanism enough to invoke it. She was punished for believing your own claims. I don't think that was the intention. It was the result. In the end the general priesthood session was quietly phased out but the priesthood ban continues.
It has meant that John Dehlin spent years creating the most valuable oral history archive of ordinary Latter-day Saint experience that has ever existed — thousands of hours of members telling their stories in their own words, built out of genuine love for the tradition — and was excommunicated for it. Mormon Stories will be more useful to honest future historians of this movement than anything produced by the Church History Department during the same period. You lost a researcher who was doing your archival work better than you were willing to do it. I don't think that was the intention. It was the result.
It has meant that people harmed by their leaders have signed documents agreeing never to speak of it, in exchange for settlements that made institutional exposure manageable. The second harm is more deliberate than the first. A church that spends serious money ensuring abused people cannot tell their stories is not protecting the flock. It is protecting itself at the direct expense of the flock. I don't think that was the intention. It was the result.
Intentions don't resolve consequences. The people harmed by emergent institutional dysfunction are harmed regardless of whether anyone designed the harm.
---
I want to name the justifications, because they deserve honest examination.
*Protect the lambs.* From what, exactly? From information? From honest questions? The assumption embedded in this framing is that faith is so fragile it cannot survive contact with critique. That is either an indictment of the faith's actual foundation or an indictment of how it has been transmitted. Probably both. A faith that requires a protected information environment to survive is not the rock the tradition claims.
*Criticism damages the critic.* This takes a legitimate psychological observation — that sustained bitterness is corrosive — and weaponizes it to preemptively discredit anyone with concerns. It locates the harm in the speaker rather than in whatever prompted the criticism. The institution never has to ask whether it did something worth criticizing. The question gets redirected before it lands.
*Criticism is apostasy in disguise.* This collapses the distinction between doubting the institution and doubting the gospel, doing enormous theological work that nobody is supposed to notice. It also means the institution gets to define apostasy in ways that protect itself from accountability — which is precisely the power a prophetic tradition should be most suspicious of concentrating in institutional hands.
*The Nothing shall Offend Them talk.* Taking Viktor Frankl's genuine insight about the human freedom to choose one's response, and deploying it so that people genuinely harmed by institutional behavior are told the harm is their own fault — that is not pastoral theology. That is liability management dressed in scripture. Frankl developed that insight in a Nazi concentration camp. It was meant to describe the irreducible dignity of the person under extreme external oppression. It was not meant to tell abuse survivors that their pain is a spiritual failure.
The common thread across all of these is that they relocate the problem. The institution is never the source of harm. The critic is always the problem — too weak, too bitter, too apostate, too easily offended. It is a closed loop that makes institutional correction structurally impossible. Which is, of course, the point. Except it was never what anyone intended, it was emergent, and then it became "not everything that’s true is useful."
---
There is an asymmetry at the heart of this arrangement that I want to name plainly, because I think you may have stopped seeing it.
The institution claims epistemic exemption. Revelation, prophetic authority, divine mandate — these place institutional conclusions outside the normal requirements of evidence, consistency, and reasoned accountability. You don't have to explain. You don't have to demonstrate. You don't have to reconcile contradictions. God said so is treated as a complete answer.
But I have to follow the rules of power. I have to sustain leadership. I have to subordinate my reasoned conclusions to institutional authority. I have to manage my speech carefully enough not to trigger disciplinary consequences. I have to operate as though this arrangement is divinely ordained, without the arrangement being required to demonstrate that it is.
The church doesn't have to follow the rules of reason. I have to follow the rules of power.
You can change doctrine without explanation — that is called revelation. I can notice the pattern of changes and ask what it means — that is called apostasy. You can make factual claims that don't survive historical scrutiny — that is called faith. I can point to the documentary record — that is called faithlessness. You can harm people and seal the record — that is called protecting the institution. I can describe what happened to me — that is called threatening the faith of the members.
The party with all the coercive mechanisms — temple recommends, disciplinary councils, family social pressure, community belonging, eternal consequence framing — also holds all the epistemic exemptions. The party with none of those things is required to behave as though the arrangement is just.
This is not a minor administrative imbalance. It is the operational structure of the institution. And it has a name. It is the same structure Jesus was critiquing when he described leaders who bind heavy burdens on others and will not lift a finger to move them.
---
I want to say something about the Gospel Essays, because they represent the clearest evidence of institutional awareness that the historical record is seriously complicated.
The Essays acknowledge polygamy's full scope, Book of Abraham translation problems, multiple first vision accounts, the racial and gender specific priesthood ban's human rather than divine origins. These are significant acknowledgments. They required courage to publish and I don't want to minimize that.
But they were placed where someone already looking would find them. They were not announced from the pulpit. They were written in language that softens every hard edge and diffuses every clear responsibility. They arrived without accompanying institutional reckoning — no apology, no restitution, no honest accounting of what the previous official narrative cost the people who built their faith on it.
And they are causing faith crises. Members who encounter them frequently report that the acknowledgment itself is more destabilizing than the underlying history. Because if the church knew — and the Essays demonstrate that at some institutional level it did — and chose not to tell you — that is a betrayal of trust that goes beyond the historical facts themselves. The hiding is more faith-destroying than the hidden thing.
So the Essays managed to simultaneously be not honest enough to satisfy serious historical inquiry and honest enough to destabilize people who trusted the correlated narrative. They found a precise middle position that serves almost nobody well. And the people who experience faith crises after reading them become cautionary examples of why members shouldn't read that kind of material — which means the exit becomes evidence for the warning, rather than evidence that the warning was itself the problem.
Confident truth does not require this much management.
---
I want to talk about what you have lost, because I don't think the accounting has been done honestly.
You lost Sam Young, who was right. You lost Kate Kelly, who was asking a legitimate question with legitimate historical grounding. You lost John Dehlin, who was building something irreplaceable. You have lost, in aggregate, a generation of the most intellectually serious, historically engaged, theologically sophisticated members the tradition has produced — precisely because the all-or-nothing demand is being met with all-or-nothing responses, and the answer is increasingly nothing.
If you had cultivated a tradition of robust internal dissent, partial belief, honest historical engagement — all the things these people were actually trying to provide — you would have people like them inside the tent in larger numbers. Complicated, critical, genuinely faithful people who stay because there is room for them. People whose questions strengthen the institution by keeping it honest. People whose presence demonstrates that the tradition can bear the weight of scrutiny.
Instead the emergent system selects against exactly the people who might have saved it.
The all-or-nothing demand is theologically indefensible on the tradition's own terms. The synoptic Jesus was remarkably comfortable with partial, messy, inconsistent, doubting engagement. Thomas got to put his hands in the wounds. Peter denied three times and received no disciplinary council. The rich young ruler walked away and Jesus let him go — no threat to his standing, no declaration of apostasy, no letter to his bishop. The Sermon on the Mount cannot be turned into a compliance checklist. The woman at the well received a full theological conversation while being precisely the kind of complicated, non-compliant person the institution has trouble with.
The all-or-nothing demand is the authoritarian model. Jesus spent considerable energy condemning it. The institution built on his name has reconstructed it with remarkable thoroughness.
---
I am writing this from inside the tradition. I hold a temple recommend. I teach Gospel Doctrine. I attended fast and testimony meeting this morning and realized something honest about the fragility of my own faith, but stayed seated because I wasn't sure the room needed to hear it. I am not your enemy. I am not trying to burn anything down.
I am trying to continue the founding question.
Joseph went to the woods because the existing institutions could not contain his honest seeking. The movement built on that moment has become an institution that cannot contain honest seeking either. That is not a minor irony. It is a precise and devastating inversion of the origin story. The church that was founded on the premise that existing institutions had corrupted the original has itself become an institution that needs restoring.
I don't think that happened on purpose.
But it happened. And the reactions — the excommunications, the NDAs, the legal apparatus, the careful management of information, the epistemic exemptions claimed while coercive power is exercised — these reactions are themselves evidence. A church confident in divine guidance does not need to silence the people asking hard questions. It answers them. A church with genuine prophetic access does not need to protect itself from historians. It engages them and learns more about itself. A church built on the founding premise that honest seeking leads to truth does not punish the honest seekers.
The reactions reveal the actual epistemological situation.
I believe the gospel survives this. The synoptic core holds up. The Sermon on the Mount holds up. The founding impulse holds up. Jesus holds up. What cannot afford the questions is not the gospel. It is the institution's specific claims about itself.
You are mistakenly protecting the wrong thing.
And the people you are losing — the questioners, the historians, the feminists, the careful thinkers, the Sam Youngs and Kate Kellys and John Dehlins — these are not the enemies of the Restoration. They are its continuation. They went to the woods. They wanted to know. They used the founding epistemology in exactly the way it was designed to be used.
You excommunicated the Restoration impulse and called it apostasy.
I don't think that happened on purpose either.
But here we are.
