How It All Began

            As many of you know, I have always been active in the LDS Church.  I believed its teachings and obeyed its counsel.  I publicly sustained its leaders as prophets, seers, and revelators on a regular basis.  I served a full-time two-year mission.  In recent years I’ve become interested in apologetics.  After watching a video about evidences supporting the Book of Mormon, I was fascinated.  I had always been taught that searching for evidence of religious truth was not God’s way, and that we should not expect to find any.  God had specifically set everything up so that we would not have any physical evidence, and our faith could be tested.  This never seemed quite right to me, so I was glad to find that faithful people had searched and found some evidence in support of the Church’s claims.  In addition, around January of 2015, a Book of Mormon apologist friend of mine also introduced me to Creation apologetics.  Studying the Creation in this light really changed the way I looked at the world.  I had always been taught that humans, animals and every other living thing had come about by the slow process of random mutation and natural selection, and no one at Church or home had ever countered it.  I had believed this from my childhood, up through my mission and into my second year of college.  However, after watching many creation-evolution debates, and seeing that the evidence for evolution was largely based on circular reasoning, and certainly not as conclusive as my teachers had always taught, I became a Creationist.  I had always claimed to believe that God created everything, but now I actually did believe it.

            One day, I was watching a video made by a Christian apologist, and he was talking about Mormonism.  I was aware of some of the arguments that people had against the Church, which I felt like I had satisfying answers to.  “Mormons used to practice polygamy!”  Well, God said that’s okay sometimes under his direction (Jacob 2:27, 30).  “Mormons used to deny Black men the priesthood!”  Well, that must be what God wanted the prophet to do at that time, and a lot of other churches did the same thing.  “There’s no evidence for the Book of Mormon anywhere in Central or South America!”  That’s because it didn’t happen there.  However, this apologist didn’t even touch on those topics.  The things that he said really caught me off guard.  However, I didn’t feel the least bit threatened.  I saw it as a challenge, and I gladly accepted it.  I had so much confidence in the Church that there was no doubt in my mind that I would find answers to his arguments if I looked in the right places.  I was pretty busy at that time, and I didn’t get to it right away, but I planned to do a little searching.

            A couple months went by, and I still hadn’t gotten around to my searching.  However, one day, in February of 2016, I was pondering some things as I worked, and the unthinkable thought popped into my mind: What if the Church weren’t actually true?  Although it was somewhat distressing, this wicked little thought made more sense the more I thought about it.  I realized at that moment that I had just been coasting through my life in the Church, and that I didn’t have any substantial reason to believe in it.  I just snapped out of it, and suddenly, all the little questions that I had been repressing through the years started to make sense.  I felt relieved and enlightened, but at the same time I felt worried.  What will my friends and family think?  Who would I marry?  Will I get to stay at BYU if word gets out?  I had built my whole life up to that point on the Church, and I wanted it to be true.  I decided that it was time for that much-needed searching.  I knew that I would come out of this experience with a satisfying level of certainty that the Church is either true or it is false, and I really hoped I would find the former.

            When I began my search, I understood that Joseph Smith’s claim must be falsifiable in order for it to be verifiable.  There would have to be a way to know if he weren’t a true prophet.  Otherwise we would just think he was whether he actually was or not.  If he were a true prophet, we would expect to see in him the signs of a true prophet and not the signs of a false prophet.  As far as praying about things, it didn’t seem like this methodology left any room for answers that went against the Church.  If you pray about the Church and you feel good, then it’s true.  If you pray about it and you don’t feel good, then you didn’t pray right and it’s still true.

            At that point, I had never received that special witness from the Spirit while praying about the Book of Mormon, although I had tried many times.  But that had never bothered me.  The Church seemed true, and I chose to believe it.  When I began my search, I started praying again to know if Joseph Smith was a true prophet and if the Book of Mormon was true.  The only other time I had prayed so earnestly and sincerely was at the beginning of my mission when I was starting to have doubts.  I had only been in the field a couple weeks when I was suddenly not completely sure if I believed in the Church.  We were very busy, and there was no time for me to just sit and think things through.  I began to desperately pray for God to tell me the truth.  I couldn’t bear to spend the next two years telling people things that I knew I didn’t believe.  But I also didn’t want to face the shame of going home early.  After all, the only alternative to an honorable release is a shameful one.  I asked God if the Church was true, as well as a few other religions, to see if I could feel the least bit of a difference.  But as always, I felt nothing.  Somehow I managed to put my doubts aside and obediently finished out my mission.

            However, this time was different.  I had no girlfriend, no demanding callings and plenty of time to think and study.  It was the perfect time to figure out, once and for all, if Joseph Smith really was a prophet, and I was ready to accept either answer.  Part of me was hoping that I would find the answers that I was looking for and that this would ultimately serve as a faith-strengthening experience that I could look back on for many years to come.  I looked up a Mormon-Protestant debate online and listened to the first few minutes.  In his opening statement, the Protestant mostly dwelled on how Mormonism teaches that there are multiple gods, whereas the Bible teaches that there is only one God.  I decided to stop there and thoroughly study this question before moving on.  I knew very well that Mormon theology was henotheistic, which is the kind of polytheism where you believe in the existence of multiple gods, but you only worship one of them.  I had been taught since I was young that, someday, I could be a god and create an earth.  Although this teaching is alive and well today, I decided to pinpoint its origin, just so I could make sure that it had actually been taught by a prophet and wasn’t just some kind of speculation that had developed over the years.  Sure enough, this doctrine was taught by Joseph Smith in the King Follett Discourse, where he said:

I am going to tell you how God came to be God.  We have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity.  I will refute that idea, and take away the veil, so that you may see ... He was once a man like us; yea, that God himself, the Father of us all, dwelt on an earth, the same as Jesus Christ Himself did ... and you have got to learn how to be gods yourselves, and to be kings and priests to God, the same as all gods have done before you.

During this sermon, Joseph Smith keeps reassuring his audience that this teaching comes from the Bible, and I used to think it did too.  To support his claim, he uses John 17:3, in which Jesus states, “This is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.”  It doesn’t take a Bible scholar to see that this verse is pretty much saying the exact opposite of what Joseph Smith is claiming.  He’s claiming that there are many gods, and that we should become gods, whereas Jesus is saying that there is only one true God, and that is our Heavenly Father.

Another verse that often comes up in connection to this question is 1 Corinthians 8, which states, “... as there be gods many and lords many.  But to us there is but one God ...” (1 Corinthians 8:5, 6).  I used to use this verse as evidence that there are multiple gods and that there is only one whom we are to worship.  However, when you read the verse in context, things start to look a little different:

As concerning therefore the eating of those things that are offered in sacrifice unto idols, we know that an idol is nothing in the world, and that there is none other God but one.  For though there be that are called gods, whether in heaven or in earth, (as there be gods many, and lords many,) But to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him (emphasis added).

So it turns out that these “gods many and lords many” are actually idols, not gods of other planets.  The gods that it’s talking about here are only called gods, and they are believed to live in both heaven and earth.  The gods that Mormons tend to think this passage is referring to are real and live in distant galaxies.  The “us” it’s referring to is not juxtaposing us earthlings from them aliens, but rather us Christians from them idol-worshipers.  It could not possibly be any clearer.  One verse that really shot Joseph Smith’s theology out of the air was Isaiah 43:10, where the Lord states, “before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me.”  This is literally the exact opposite of what Joseph Smith taught about God and what Mormons believe to this day.  In the aforementioned sermon, Joseph Smith states, “We have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity.  I will refute that idea ...”  Now wherever did we get this naive notion that God was God from all eternity?  Maybe the Bible? (Psalm 90:2)  Maybe the Book of Mormon? (Moroni 8:18)  Maybe the Doctrine and Covenants? (D&C 20:17)  I just kept finding one doctrinal contradiction after another, and I was still on the first question.  Things weren’t looking very good for Joseph Smith.

            However, I will admit that there was one thing that was a little bit of a stumbling block to the idea that Joseph Smith was not a prophet.  I remembered all that time I had spent learning about the the presence of Haplogroup X mtDNA in North America and the Book of Mormon model based on that premise.  However, this evidence isn’t conclusive, and there are ways to understand it without Joseph Smith being a prophet.  For example, Joseph Smith wasn’t the first person to come up with the idea that the Native Americans are descendants of Jews.  In 1823, an American Protestant minister named Ethan Smith published a book called View of the Hebrews; or the Tribes of Israel in America, in which he proposes the idea that Jews anciently sailed to America, developed into a civilized and an uncivilized group, and that the uncivilized group destroyed the civilized group through warfare.  In addition, some of the evidence for Jews in ancient America proposed by Book of Mormon apologists doesn’t quite fit the Book of Mormon timeline.  For example, many of their artifacts with Hebrew writing on them (which could very well be hoaxes) are written in block letters, which wouldn’t have existed until after exile, as it was in exile that Hebrew came to have block letters.  Also, the Hanukiah mound in Ohio, which depicts a nine-branched hanukiah, is championed as a Nephite mound, yet hanukiahs, candelabras with nine branches instead of the traditional seven, didn’t come about until after the Maccabean Revolt in the 2^nd century BC, commemorating the fact that the lamp in the Temple burned for eight days instead of one.  The Lehites and Mulekites are supposed to have come out of Jerusalem in the 6^th century BC, and they would have only had seven-branched menorahs.  In any case, if Joseph Smith was a prophet for knowing that Jews lived in ancient America, then so was Ethan Smith.

            At one point, I remembered that the Dead Sea Scrolls contained a complete Isaiah scroll that was written before the time of Christ.  Seeing as all these changes to the Bible were supposed to have been made by the Great and Abominable Church after the time of Christ, as the Book of Mormon says (1 Nephi 13:26-40), I thought, “Hmm, I wonder ...”  If the corrections Joseph Smith made in the Book of Isaiah match what I find written in the Isaiah scroll, which was penned before the time of Christ, then that would be a major piece of evidence in support of Joseph Smith.  Luckily, there was a complete photocopy of this scroll on the Internet, so I looked up the verses that Joseph Smith had edited, looked them up in the Mishnaic Hebrew text that the Old Testament is normally translated out of, and compared them with the corresponding passages on the Isaiah scroll.  However, to my waning surprise, the Isaiah scroll matched the Mishnaic text down to the exact word.  Not a single word had been changed after all these years.  It looks like the only one changing the Bible is Joseph Smith.

            The more I studied, the more certain I became that Joseph Smith was not a true prophet, and that the LDS church was not what it claimed to be.  This frustrated me for a number of reasons.  I was learning things that were turning my world upside down, and I couldn’t even tell anyone about it.  I had read stories about students getting expelled from BYU, being evicted from their apartments and having all that they had worked for go to waste simply for losing their faith in the Church.  I imagine that they resigned from the Church while they were still enrolled at BYU, which is not a smart move, and I had no intention of doing that.  But still, I was afraid of being too outspoken, getting myself into trouble and putting my education in jeopardy.  I was taking a D&C class at the time, and that was a little rough.  Religion classes were pretty hard as it was with teachers being subjective and grading harshly.  In fact, that’s probably why they called it D&C, because those were the grades people got.  If that weren’t hard enough, I also had to heavily filter the things that I said and wrote.  I don’t like to pretend.  I’d rather be authentic.

            During this period, I started going to other churches and looking for alternatives.  I would spend hours and hours some weekends at church activities.  On Saturday I would go to a Jehovah’s Witness meeting for two hours, and on Sunday I would visit a Baptist church for a couple hours, and then I would attend the full three-hour block at my LDS ward.  I realized that the truthfulness of God and Jesus did not hang on Joseph Smith, so I continued to read the Bible and study its teachings.  There were things that I liked and disliked about both the Baptists and Jehovah’s Witnesses.  The theology of Jehovah’s Witnesses seemed to align better with the text of the Bible, whereas the Baptists believed a lot of traditional doctrines such as the Trinity and the conscious state of the dead, which are not taught in the Bible.  However, the Baptists were more authentic in their worship of God, while Jehovah’s Witnesses, like the Mormons, believed that their group is special, and that there is no salvation outside of their group.  I continued worshiping God on my own and studying the Bible, but I never found any religious group whose views perfectly aligned with mine.  All the while, I continued to participate in LDS church activities.

            In April of that year, after having studied this information for a couple months, I grew tired of questioning the Church.  I loved the Church, and it was central to everything I had ever wanted to do or be.  I did not think I could be happy outside of it.  I wanted to be with my people.  I decided to find some way to reconcile all of the contradictions.  I told myself that the devil couldn’t have inspired Joseph Smith, because the Church led people to Christ.  It had produced so much good fruit that it simply had to be true, despite all of the problems I had discovered.  So I repented and went back to my old way of thinking, but it wasn’t long before all of the contradictions started to bother me again.  If there really were only one true God, then there couldn’t be many true Gods.  If God were God from all eternity, then he couldn’t have ever become God.  This was the beginning of my Mormon Canonicalism.  I decided that whenever I would encounter a disparity between the statements made by modern prophets and the text of the scriptures, I would always side with the scriptures.  I found quotes by a couple different prophets who had said to do just that.  With the LDS canon as my basis, I went through the scriptures, topic by topic, and made a few changes to the way I understood Church doctrine.  The scriptures clearly teach that there is one God (Alma 11:28-31, Moses 1:6), that he is Jehovah, our Heavenly Father (D&C 109:4, 34) and that he was God from all eternity (Moroni 8:18, D&C 20:17).  The scriptures also teach that where you go in the spirit world depends on your righteousness, not on whether or not you've been baptized, and you can’t move from hell up to paradise (Alma 40:12, Luke 16:26).  From now on, my theology would be completely backed in scripture, and I would not simply rely on things that I had heard at home or at church.  I was well aware that some of my views went against the current teachings of the Church, but I also knew that these teachings had changed over time.  I held this position from about April to October of 2016.

            Although this canonical view of Mormonism was satisfying at first, I couldn’t get around the fact that it went against the teachings of the latter-day prophets.  According to the Doctrine and Covenants, we’re supposed to take all of the prophet’s teachings and commandments as if they came from the Lord himself (D&C 1:38, 21:4).  So either all the modern prophets are wrong about the nature of God, or all the ancient apostles and prophets, including Jesus himself, were wrong.  When I started studying these issues again, I learned that there were a whole bunch of other problems with Joseph Smith and the Church, some of which I had never even heard of before.  Besides teaching us to worship a vastly different God than the one we read about in the scriptures, Joseph Smith made multiple time-specific prophecies which were not fulfilled.  He also made verifiably false translations and abused his authority over people in ways that a man of God would not.  I realized that Joseph Smith showed all of the Biblical signs of a false prophet, and I decided that I should probably stop putting my faith in him.  I made this decision in about October of 2016, and have never gone back.  All the while I continued to actively participate in the Church.