📜 The CES Letter — A Critical Walkthrough

In 2013, a seventh-generation Latter-day Saint named Jeremy Runnells was offered the chance by a Church Educational System (CES) director to share his doubts about LDS history and origins. Runnells wrote a long, carefully-sourced letter cataloging the problems he had found. The CES director promised a response. None ever came. The letter spread, became CES Letter — My Search for Answers to my Mormon Doubts, and has become arguably the single most influential internal critique of Mormonism in the internet era. It lives at cesletter.org, where it can be read for free in full.

The point of this Deep Dive is not to attack LDS people — many are sincere, kind, and hungry for truth — and it is not to simply hand Runnells a victory. The point is to do what 2 Timothy 3:16–17 commands: hold every claim up to Scripture and to evidence, and let the honest reader decide. Runnells makes some claims that are factually airtight and confirmed by the LDS Church itself. He makes others that are weaker, or where his framework (modern secular skepticism) cuts against historic Christianity just as hard as it cuts against Mormonism. Both deserve honest engagement.

Anchor verse: "All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness" (2 Timothy 3:16). The standard is Scripture. Frameworks — Runnells' and LDS apologists' alike — get measured against the Word.

1. Most of Runnells' factual claims are airtight. The seer stone in the hat, the multiple First Vision accounts, the Book of Abraham translation failure, Joseph's 34+ wives including teens and married women, the priesthood ban, the Adam-God doctrine, the Kinderhook Plates, the priesthood restoration backdating, the Masonic timeline, the institutional whitewashing — all of these are confirmed by the LDS Church itself in its Gospel Topics Essays or in primary sources the Church does not dispute. Runnells did not invent these problems. He compiled them.

2. The LDS apologetic responses tend to fall into a recognizable pattern: Either (a) appeal to divine choice that conveniently mimics a natural explanation (KJV italics, Masonic parallels), (b) retroactively redefine terms or geography to dodge specific predictions (horses, Hill Cumorah), or (c) reframe what a "prophet" means to dissolve the contradiction between successive prophets teaching contradictory doctrines (Adam-God, priesthood ban). These responses preserve faith but do so at the cost of the original confident claims of the institution.

3. Runnells is on weakest ground in the Science section — where his framework (old-earth secular naturalism) is not specifically a critique of Mormonism but of biblical theism generally. Conservative biblical Christians would respond differently to that section than to the others.

4. The right posture for a Christian reading the CES Letter: Take the historical claims seriously — the LDS Church itself confirms most of them. Don't assume Runnells is anti-Mormon or attacking faith; he was a believer asking believers' questions. But also don't accept his deeper framework uncritically — the burning-in-the-bosom problem he identifies is real, but the answer is not skepticism, it's the historically and evidentially grounded gospel of Jesus Christ as recorded in publicly verifiable Scripture (1 Corinthians 15:3–8, Luke 1:1–4).

5. The Galatians 1 test. The clearest biblical standard for evaluating any "restored gospel" claim is Galatians 1:6–9: "I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting Him who called you by the grace of Christ, for a different gospel... But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be accursed!" Whatever Joseph Smith taught about the necessity of additional revelation, temple ordinances, or works for exaltation — measure it against the gospel of grace as preached by Paul. The CES Letter shows the historical problems. Galatians shows the theological standard.