An Obligatory Page About the CES Letter

"I love it when random people comment in threads where the finer points of LDS doctrine is being discussed and just leave a link to the CES Letter and disappear. I imagine they feel like bomber pilots, dropping a nuke and getting out of there, imagining the devastation they're leaving in their wake.... Generally, people just chuckle at the interruption, perhaps comment on how pitiful the CES Letter is and how sad it is that anyone finds it convincing, and then continue their discussion." - Eirik Scoville

The "Letter to a CES Director", later renamed the "CES Letter" because five words takes too long to type, has received far more attention than it deserves, to the point that I've caved and decided to give it some more. I'm going to focus on the little-known story of how it came to be, rather than a specific response, though I'll link to a few of those toward the end. To recap, in 2012 a Latter-day Saint named Jeremy Runnells found unsettling information about church history on the internet, felt betrayed and lied to because he hadn't learned these things while growing up in the church, and lost his testimony. It appears that his testimony was prone to such damage in large part because it depended on several peurile fundamentalist assumptions about what the church and the gospel were supposed to be, and I don't say that to be derogatory. These kinds of assumptions have been promulgated and reinforced by generations of church talks, magazines, and curricula. I had a similar worldview before my own first faith crisis and had to change it substantially when I encountered information that didn't fit in it. I can absolutely relate to the feeling of betrayal, too, and I never fully got over it.

​Scholar Patrick Mason observed, "The letter is nearly a perfect inverse of the version of Mormonism it is reacting to. Jeremy Runnels may have written the letter, but it was actually an inevitability - someone, sometime, somewhere was going to write that letter, because it was the obvious response to a certain style, tone, and mode of Mormonism that culminated in the highly doctrinaire, no-retreat-no-surrender positions taken by certain church leaders and members especially in the second half of the twentieth century. I would actually agree with the CES letter's basic notion, that the Mormonism it is responding to is unsustainable. Where I disagree is that I don't think the Mormonism it is responding to is actually the real, only, or inevitable Mormonism. Certainly, that was some people's Mormonism, but it's not my Mormonism, and I don't think it's the Mormonism that is going to endure in future decades and centuries."

Yet Jeremy Runnells has had his own problems with transparency. Late that same year he posted a mocking and sarcastic "Open Letter to Elder Quentin L. Cook", which he now never mentions, on the ex-Mormon subreddit under the pseudonym "Kolobot". Publicly, he pretended to still be seeking answers and resolutions to his concerns. A CES (Church Education System) director who knew his grandfather inquired about what these concerns were, so he compiled a letter that purported to be exactly those. In reality, he crowdsourced much of this material from the ex-Mormon subreddit and didn't bother to read the sources he was given or represent their claims accurately. Six months after his first letter and under his real name this time, he posted "Letter to a CES Director" on the internet for his posterity and all the world to read. It almost immediately drew a lot of unwarranted publicity and a bizarre level of fawning adulation from the ex-Mormon community. It sparked probably tens of thousands of additional faith crises. So Jeremy Runnells did the only logical thing: he quit his job to organize the CES Letter Foundation, solicit donations, and promote it full time. Rumor has it he's making six figures a year from promoting his letter, but nobody knows for sure because, even though he criticizes the church for not disclosing its finances, he doesn't disclose his finances. Most peculiar.

​Like most materials critical of the church, the CES Letter has nothing new to say. Jeremy Runnells never claimed that it had anything new to say. He has pointed out that he never claimed that it had anything new to say. He has no academic credentials or experience whatsoever and the letter's level of discourse reflects this. So why do its acolytes think it's such a big screaming deal and obsessively spam church-related discussions with links to it? I believe it's because, in a particularly egregious example of the "big list" fallacy, it substitutes quantity for quality by compiling so many criticisms into so little space. His letter is like Jerald and Sandra Tanner's work compressed, dumbed down, and secularized for the digital age. Too many people these days don't want to do real research. They don't want detail or nuance or context. They want bullet points and sound bites, and the CES Letter provides as many as they could want. Even then, reading it is too much effort for some people. Someone called "lavaman" once posted on the Recovery from Mormonism forum requesting "a concise [anti-Mormon] book, easy to read... and you do not have [to] sift through complex arguments, difficult language, lengthy diatribe etc..." When someone called "the1v" recommended the CES Letter, lavaman said "I like cesletter - needs to be even shorter..." Around this same time the anti-Mormon site Zelph on the Shelf posted "The Millennial's Brief Guide to the CES Letter" which offered one-sentence summaries of fifty-three points from the letter. In fairness, they urged interested parties to "GO READ THE REAL THING, YOU LAZY FREAKS."

In early 2016, after staying in the church despite not believing it for well over three years, Jeremy Runnells' stake leadership initiated disciplinary proceedings against him for apostasy. He chose to make a media spectacle out of these otherwise confidential proceedings and paint himself as a martyr. In April, during his disciplinary council, he resigned his membership just before he could be excommunicated and marched outside to announce it to his fans. Now he could gloat that he was the one who had excommunicated the church. He sure showed them, eh? His supporters protested the church's efforts to punish him for "asking questions", because they didn't understand the difference between a question and an accusation, and somehow the sarcastic and mocking tone throughout the CES Letter (to say nothing of his earlier letter to Elder Cook) escaped their notice. Like John Dehlin before him, the only conceivable reason for militant non-believer Jeremy Runnells to retain his membership was to increase his perceived credibility with other members. You don't need to be a member to participate in Elders Quorum father-son campouts. Unlike John Dehlin, however, he wasn't doing it right because most people didn't even realize he was still a member.

Jeremy Runnells has often protested, especially while arguing with his stake president, that all of the facts in his letter are accurate and in many cases have been vindicated by the church's Gospel Topics essays that came out shortly afterward. But that's missing the point. The facts he chooses to include in his letter, the facts he chooses not to include, and the lens he puts in front of his facts to consistently cast the church in the least flattering light possible, all combine to present a very specific agenda that is by no means objective or "just telling the truth". He's entitled to his viewpoint, but it's disingenuous for him to claim not to understand why promoting this viewpoint and destroying people's testimonies constitutes apostasy, or that alternative viewpoints exist among people who know as much and far more about church history than he does. Every "question" he raises in his letter had been known and answered many times by 2013. He doesn't consider these answers satisfactory because they come from unofficial apologists and not church leadership, but since he had already lost belief in the church well before he crowdsourced his "questions" from the ex-Mormon subreddit, it's doubtful anything church leaders could say would make much of a difference anyway.

Nonetheless, there have been many specific responses to the CES Letter since it came out, sometimes going point-by-point and sometimes offering broader summaries of its perceived deficiencies. By far the best and wittiest one, in my opinion, is Jim Bennett's "A Reply from a Former CES Employee". For a while, whenever someone shared it with Jeremy Runnells on Facebook, he deleted it, blocked them, and continued to complain that no one had answered his "questions". Eventually he met with Jim Bennett in person, they became friends, and he attempted a response. A fair bit shorter but still extensive response is Michael R. Ash's "Bamboozled by the CES Letter". At almost the same length, Brian Hales provides an annotated version of the entire letter with several external links. Much shorter responses include Dr. Daniel C. Peterson's "Some Reflections on That Letter to a CES Director" and Kevin Christensen's "Eye of the Beholder, Law of the Harvest: Observations on the Inevitable Consequences of the Different Investigative Approaches of Jeremy Runnells and Jeff Lindsay". Jeremy Runnells has in turn responded on the "Debunkings" section of his website.

Undoubtedly the worst response to the CES Letter was a series of videos released by FAIR in late 2020 starring Kwaku El and Brad Witbeck. Their target audience was Generation Z, and they aimed to reach it with youthful slang, irreverent humor, and lots of mockery. As a believing church member at the time, I wanted to like the videos and at first I did. I thought Jeremy Runnells and his stupid letter deserved the mockery. But I soon reversed my opinion when I realized the videos were mocking anyone with sincere doubts or concerns about, say, Joseph Smith marrying a 14-year-old girl. FAIR blocked me and other believing members from its Facebook page for criticizing the tone of these videos. It turned off YouTube comments and hid the like/dislike counts. It doubled down and defended its approach in a blog post written by anonymous staff members with comments turned off. I also complained in an independent apologist Facebook group, where FAIR founder Daryl Barksdale and other middle-aged white men belittled me and insisted that the tone of these videos was necessary to reach young people. Then in March 2021, the videos quietly disappeared from YouTube - or they would have if they hadn't been immortalized in several response videos - and FAIR committed to actually be Christlike in its apologetics.

​I want to share one more thing. I attended ward prayer with the Logan YSA 35th Ward several times in 2016. Each Sunday evening, we passed around a paper to write down the names of people we wanted to pray for. Every time, somebody wrote "Jeremy Runnells". I later found out that someone in that ward was his sister-in-law, so it was almost certainly her. I always found it touching.