Navigating Doubts Through Fear (Renlund)

A response to the LDS Discussions blog post critiquing Elder and Sister Renlund’s January 2019 worldwide devotional on faith and doubt.

Overview of the LDS Discussions Critique

On January 16, 2019, LDS Discussions published a blog post titled “Navigating Doubts in the LDS Church,” responding to the worldwide devotional given three days earlier by Elder Dale G. Renlund and Sister Ruth L. Renlund at BYU–Hawaii. The devotional, titled “Doubt Not, but Be Believing,” addressed questions of faith, doubt, and how Latter-day Saints ought to approach spiritual inquiry.

The LDS Discussions author advanced four primary charges against the talk: (1) that it shamed and vilified those with doubts; (2) that it dismissed serious historical and doctrinal concerns as trivial cosmetic “dents”; (3) that it manipulatively used fear to discourage honest inquiry; and (4) that its epistemological framework—favoring faith over doubt—is philosophically untenable and dishonest. Each of these charges merits careful examination, because careful examination reveals that the LDS Discussions critique systematically misrepresents the talk, imports assumptions the Renlunds never made, and itself commits the very logical errors it attributes to the Church.

This response works through the critique point by point, engages its substantive historical claims, and demonstrates why the Renlund devotional, fairly read, represents a reasonable and compassionate epistemological position rather than an exercise in fear-based manipulation.

Claim 1: The Talk “Shamed Those with Doubts”

The LDS Discussions author opens by declaring that the devotional “followed a pattern… shaming those with doubts, demonizing those who have found out about troubling church topics, and using fear to keep members from looking beyond faith-promoting, correlated sources.” This framing is asserted at the outset and then treated as established throughout the remainder of the post—a classic example of begging the question. The conclusion is assumed before the evidence is weighed.

What did the Renlunds actually say about those with doubts? They opened by acknowledging the very real struggles of young adults navigating questions about the Church. They shared the story of a young man—referred to as “Steven”—not to ridicule him, but to illustrate a pattern they described as spiritually dangerous: the movement from question to question without genuine resolution. Even in this telling, the Renlunds report that Elder Renlund personally connected Steven with researchers and “reliable primary sources” to address each successive concern. This is not the behavior of leaders who simply want questioners silenced. It is the behavior of leaders who genuinely tried to help someone through doubt and observed that it did not result in resolution.

The LDS Discussions author reads Sister Renlund’s description of Steven as “victim blaming.” But this characterization requires us to accept two premises the post never defends: first, that Steven’s concerns were all genuinely unresolvable; and second, that having one’s concerns addressed and yet moving immediately to new concerns is always evidence of honest inquiry rather than a fixed disposition against the Church. The Renlunds were making a distinction between honest inquiry—which they explicitly affirmed—and a posture in which doubt becomes a settled orientation rather than a means toward truth. This distinction has a long philosophical pedigree and does not require one to believe that all doubts are illegitimate.

Crucially, the devotional never claimed that having doubts makes someone a bad person. The Renlunds explicitly invited those struggling to attend, and the announcement email asked members to bring friends who were struggling—hardly the posture of an institution trying to shame people into silence. To interpret pastoral concern about the spiritual direction of doubt as equivalent to shaming doubters is to conflate the act of questioning with the person doing the questioning, which is precisely the error the LDS Discussions author attributes, unfairly, to the Renlunds.

Claim 2: The Boat Parable Dismisses Serious Concerns as Trivial

The LDS Discussions author objects strenuously to Sister Renlund’s question: “Do dents and peeling paint on the church change its ability to provide the authorized saving and exalting ordinances to help us become like our Heavenly Father?” The author argues this framing trivializes genuine historical problems—Book of Abraham translation, DNA and the Book of Mormon, Deutero-Isaiah, priesthood ban, polygamy—and is “absurd.”

This objection has surface appeal but contains a fundamental equivocation. Whether a given historical question constitutes a foundational structural flaw or a surface imperfection depends entirely on one’s prior conclusion about the Church’s truth claims. The LDS Discussions author treats his own conclusion—that the Church is false—as the self-evident interpretive framework for evaluating the metaphor. But a person who has weighed the same evidence and reached a different conclusion is not irrational for describing those same issues differently. The metaphor was addressed to believing members navigating doubt, not to critics who have already concluded the institution is fraudulent. Criticizing a pastoral metaphor for not conceding the critic’s own conclusions is circular reasoning.

Furthermore, the Renlunds never claimed there are no historical difficulties. The entire structure of the boat parable presupposes that the boat has imperfections—“dents and peeling paint.” The point was about where one’s evaluative focus should lie: on the vehicle’s essential function, or on its surface flaws. This is not a dismissal of historical inquiry. It is a question about what constitutes a sufficient reason to abandon a covenant relationship. Believers and critics will answer that question differently, and neither answer requires dishonesty.

The claim that the “entire foundation of the church is built on this history and doctrine, and if it is not true, the church itself is not true” is itself a contested theological claim, not a self-evident logical consequence. Many historically informed, intellectually serious Latter-day Saints have engaged the very issues catalogued by LDS Discussions and reached the opposite conclusion. Their existence does not prove the Church is true, but it does conclusively demonstrate that the LDS Discussions author’s certainty is not the only intellectually defensible position.

Claim 3: The Talk Used Fear to Suppress Inquiry

The charge of fear-mongering centers on two elements of the talk: the warning that “slipping back into the water… is risky,” and the citation from John A. Widtsoe comparing stagnant doubt to “poisonous fungi.” The LDS Discussions author treats these as manipulation tactics designed to frighten members into intellectual compliance.

Consider the first element. Warning that a spiritual decision carries spiritual risk is not fear-mongering in any philosophically meaningful sense. Every belief system—including the secular naturalism implicitly underlying the LDS Discussions project—involves consequentialist claims about the costs of error. A doctor who warns a patient that rejecting treatment is “risky” is not engaging in fear manipulation; she is communicating her genuine assessment of the stakes. The Renlunds believe the covenant path leads to eternal life. To say that abandoning it is spiritually risky is simply to state the logical consequence of their belief system. One may disagree with the belief, but disagreement is not the same as demonstrating manipulation.

The Widtsoe citation is more rhetorically vivid and worth engaging directly. Widtsoe distinguishes between doubt that motivates genuine inquiry and “stagnant doubt”—a settled disposition of skepticism that does not transform into honest questions but rather luxuriates in unbelief as an end in itself. The language is strong, but the underlying distinction is philosophically sound. The psychologist William R. Miller and others in the motivational interviewing tradition have noted that ambivalence and genuine openness to change are not the same psychological state. A person who has genuinely examined evidence and concluded the Church is false is in a different epistemic position from one who maintains performative doubt as an identity or social posture. Widtsoe was describing the latter, and the description—however colorful—captures a real phenomenon.

The LDS Discussions author takes the characterization personally, writing that it is “insulting” to be called “lazy.” But Widtsoe was characterizing people who substitute ridicule for reason and avoid the effort of genuine inquiry—not every person who has researched Church history. The author’s sense of personal offense is understandable, but it does not constitute a refutation of the distinction Widtsoe drew.

Claim 4: The Epistemology of “Faith First” Is Philosophically Untenable

The most substantive philosophical challenge in the LDS Discussions post concerns the Renlunds’ argument that questions framed by “could these things not be true” lead to faith, while questions framed by “couldn’t these things not be false” lead to doubt. The author interprets this as the Church demanding that members pre-commit to a conclusion before examining evidence.

This criticism would be decisive if the Renlunds were making a claim about historical epistemology—about how one should evaluate documentary evidence, DNA studies, or ancient languages. But that is not what the statement addresses. The statement concerns the starting posture of the will in the process of spiritual inquiry. This is not an obscure theological idiosyncrasy. It is a position with distinguished philosophical support.

William James, in his celebrated 1896 essay “The Will to Believe,” argued that in matters involving “genuine options”—questions that are living, forced, and momentous—the posture of the will toward belief is itself epistemically relevant. James showed that the strict evidentialist demand to withhold belief until evidence is complete is not a neutral stance; it is itself a choice that carries its own risks of error, specifically the risk of missing truths that are only accessible through committed engagement. The Renlunds were not asking members to believe in spite of evidence; they were making a Jamesian point about the conditions under which spiritual evidence becomes available at all.

Nephi’s words in the Book of Mormon articulate the same principle: “I will go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded, for I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them” (1 Nephi 3:7). Moroni’s promise in Moroni 10:4 similarly frames sincere inquiry within the context of a believing heart and genuine intent. This is not circular reasoning; it is the recognition that spiritual epistemology operates through different mechanisms than scientific epistemology, and that demanding scientific methods produce spiritual results is a category error.

The LDS Discussions author does not engage this epistemological tradition. He simply asserts that “faith” and “doubt” operate in opposition to each other, and that honest inquiry requires beginning with skepticism. But this is precisely the position William James’s essay showed to be philosophically indefensible when applied to genuine options with profound personal stakes.

The Church History Whack-a-Mole Argument Reconsidered

The LDS Discussions author turns the “whack-a-mole” metaphor against the Church: if concerns keep surfacing, perhaps that is because the Church does not have the answers. This is rhetorically effective, but it misidentifies the phenomenon the Renlunds were describing.

There is a genuine difference between two types of “whack-a-mole” experiences. In the first, new concerns arise because each answered concern reveals a deeper connected problem—and this can happen because the underlying facts are genuinely damning. In the second, new concerns arise because the inquirer’s prior commitment is to disbelief rather than to honest inquiry, and so each answered concern is replaced by a new one not because the evidence demands it, but because the conclusion is fixed in advance. The Renlunds were describing the second pattern, illustrated through Steven’s case. The LDS Discussions author assumes the first pattern is the only one that exists and uses it to preempt the Renlunds’ observation. But this again begs the question.

Moreover, the claim that “if the church really had answers to all of these problems, the game would be easy for the church to win” rests on an unstated premise: that the existence of ongoing intellectual challenges is itself evidence of institutional failure. But this is not how epistemology works in any domain. The existence of unresolved questions does not demonstrate that the conventional understanding is wrong; it demonstrates that the questions are difficult. Every field of serious human inquiry—cosmology, evolutionary biology, ancient historiography—contains questions that remain contested and unresolved. The LDS Discussions standard, if consistently applied, would require rejecting nearly every complex historical and scientific framework we have.

The Renlunds’ position—that genuine answers exist, that the Church actively provides access to primary sources and rigorous scholarship, and that faith grounded in personal revelation is not defeated by unresolved questions—is a coherent and reasonable position. It does not require dishonesty, and it does not require members to ignore evidence.

On “Reliable Sources” and the Church’s Own Transparency

The LDS Discussions author mocks the concept of “reliable, trustworthy sources” as Church code for correlated materials, and catalogues past instances of Church leaders making statements now disavowed. This is a fair historical observation in itself, but the author uses it to argue that the Church has no basis for directing members to trustworthy sources because all Church sources are unreliable.

This argument proves far too much. The fact that any institution has a history of error does not mean it has no basis for distinguishing better sources from worse ones in the present. Scientists disavow past scientific claims routinely; that does not mean the scientific community has forfeited the right to distinguish peer-reviewed journals from pseudoscience. The same logic applies here. The Church’s Gospel Topics Essays—published beginning in 2013 with the explicit approval of the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve—address the Book of Abraham, polygamy, DNA and the Book of Mormon, the priesthood ban, the First Vision accounts, and other sensitive historical topics with frankness. These essays directly engage the same issues the LDS Discussions author cites as evidence of institutional dishonesty. They are available on the official Church website. They have been endorsed by General Authorities for use in instructing doubting members. They are not correlated whitewash; they are, in multiple cases, the most candid official accounting of difficult history the institution has ever produced.

The Renlunds’ reference to “reliable primary sources” in the context of directing Steven to historical research is consistent with the Church’s own Joseph Smith Papers Project—an exhaustive, multi-volume scholarly publication of Joseph Smith’s original documents that was funded and sponsored by the Church itself. Elder Renlund specifically cited his own reading of the complete Joseph Smith Papers as the basis of his closing testimony. Whatever one concludes from the Joseph Smith Papers, the Church’s investment in that project is incompatible with the characterization of an institution trying to hide its history.

The LDS Discussions author notes that Brian Hauglid, an LDS scholar cited in the Book of Abraham Gospel Topics Essay, later disavowed some of his prior apologetics on the Book of Abraham. This is cited as evidence that the apologetic enterprise crumbles under scrutiny. But Hauglid’s scholarly journey—whatever its ultimate destination—is itself a product of the open, source-based engagement with primary documents that the Church funded and published. It illustrates that honest engagement with Church history, conducted on the basis of primary sources and rigorous methodology, is not something the Church suppresses. It is something the Church actively supports, even when the results are uncomfortable.

The DNA and Book of Abraham Questions

The LDS Discussions author flips the Renlunds’ financial and medical analogies to argue we should trust geneticists over Joseph Smith on Native American origins, and Egyptologists over Joseph Smith on the Book of Abraham. This is rhetorically effective but depends on a contested premise treated as settled: that the scientific consensus on each of these questions is complete, correctly interpreted, and decisively rules out the Latter-day Saint position.

On the DNA question, the broad pattern of Native American migratory origins from Asia is well established. What is not established is that this evidence “conclusively” rules out a small Near Eastern migration of the type described in the Book of Mormon among a larger existing population. Population geneticists have noted that the genetic signal of a small founding group can be quickly swamped by intermarriage with a larger pre-existing population. The Church’s Gospel Topics Essay on DNA explicitly engages this point with scholarly nuance. The LDS Discussions author does not engage it; he simply restates the genetic consensus as though it resolves a question that population geneticists themselves have not addressed as their primary research concern.

On the Book of Abraham, the author states flatly that every Egyptologist considers it “untrue.” This characterization papers over a genuinely complex scholarly debate. The papyri recovered in 1966 do not include what Joseph Smith identified as Facsimile 3, and the relationship between the extant papyri and the Book of Abraham text remains contested. Egyptologists are the appropriate authorities on Egyptian translation; they are not the appropriate final authorities on the nature of prophetic revelation, the mechanism of Joseph Smith’s translation process, or the relationship between the catalyst text and the revealed content. The LDS Discussions author collapses these distinct questions into one, attributing expert authority to Egyptologists beyond the domain of their actual expertise.

None of this is to claim the apologetic responses are conclusive. They are not. But “not conclusive” is very different from “definitively refuted.” The LDS Discussions author consistently conflates these two very different epistemic states throughout the post.

On Elias, Elijah, and the Credibility of Elder Renlund’s Testimony

The LDS Discussions author concludes with what he presents as a devastating observation: Elder Renlund testified of Joseph Smith seeing both “Elias and Elijah,” but the author asserts these are simply the Hebrew and Greek names for the same person, proving Joseph did not understand what he claimed to have seen. This would be a significant point if it were accurate. It is not.

“Elijah” (Hebrew: Eliyyahu) and “Elias” (the Greek transliteration of the same name in the New Testament) do indeed refer to the same Old Testament prophet when used in the same linguistic context. However, in Latter-day Saint scripture and theology, “Elias” has a distinct meaning established by Joseph Smith in Doctrine and Covenants 27:6–7, where “Elias” refers to a separate individual—the resurrected prophet who appeared in connection with the restoration of the Abrahamic dispensation. This is not a confusion born of ignorance; it is a deliberate theological distinction within the Restoration framework, where the Greek term was repurposed to identify a specific prophetic office or person distinct from the Old Testament Elijah. Whether one accepts the theology, the claim that Joseph Smith simply confused a Hebrew and Greek word for the same name is demonstrably incorrect as an account of what the Doctrine and Covenants actually teaches.

This error is representative of a broader pattern in the LDS Discussions post: presenting a superficially compelling criticism that does not survive engagement with the actual doctrinal and historical context it purports to address. The post is directed at members who are already doubting, and it assumes they will not cross-check its claims against the primary sources it claims to champion.

What the Renlund Devotional Actually Taught

Stripped of the LDS Discussions framing, the Renlund devotional advances a coherent and compassionate pastoral message: that questions are natural and important; that honest inquiry directed toward reliable sources, including primary historical documents, is spiritually productive; that personal revelation through sincere prayer and covenant living provides a form of knowledge that purely intellectual inquiry cannot substitute; and that the posture one brings to spiritual investigation matters for what one will find. None of these claims is irrational. None of them requires ignoring historical evidence. And none of them is fairly characterized as “shaming,” “demonizing,” or “using fear.”

The LDS Discussions author writes, in his conclusion, that “the only true way to promote faith and to erase doubt is to encourage all members to research the claims of the church from both church and non-church sources.” The Renlunds would likely agree that research matters. What they would add—and what the LDS Discussions author does not engage—is that research conducted within a framework of prior committed skepticism is no more neutral or reliable than research conducted within a framework of prior committed faith. Both require the researcher to make a choice about where to stand before the evidence is fully assembled. The question is which posture is more likely to lead to truth—and on that question, the Renlunds and Elder Widtsoe have company in the broader history of philosophy and religion that the LDS Discussions post never acknowledges.

The testimony Elder Renlund offered at the close of the devotional—grounded in his own sustained engagement with the Joseph Smith Papers, the narrative history of the Church, and decades of personal and pastoral experience—is not the testimony of a man who has avoided the evidence. It is the testimony of a man who has weighed it differently than LDS Discussions has, from a different starting point, with a different epistemological framework, and arrived at a different conclusion. That conclusion deserves to be engaged on its merits, not dismissed as the product of institutional fear-mongering.

Conclusion

The LDS Discussions critique of the Renlund devotional fails on its own stated terms. It charges the Renlunds with intellectual dishonesty while itself misrepresenting the content of the talk, begging the central epistemological questions, overstating the decisiveness of scientific evidence, mischaracterizing the Elias/Elijah distinction, and substituting rhetorical force for argument at precisely the points where argument is most needed.

This does not mean the historical questions the post raises are without merit. Some of them are genuinely difficult. The Church has acknowledged as much through its Gospel Topics Essays, its Joseph Smith Papers Project, and the frank historical engagement of numerous Latter-day Saint scholars. What is not warranted is the LDS Discussions author’s confident conclusion that the questions are all resolved—in favor of disbelief—and that the Renlunds’ pastoral response to those questions is therefore nothing but manipulation.

The believer who sits with genuine historical uncertainty and chooses, as a matter of will and covenant commitment, to begin from faith rather than doubt is not being irrational. She is exercising the kind of epistemic courage that William James defended in “The Will to Believe,” that Alma described in Alma 32, and that Elder and Sister Renlund articulated with pastoral clarity to a worldwide audience of young adults who needed to hear it.

Doubt is not dangerous because it leads to questions. It becomes dangerous when it becomes an end in itself—when the goal is no longer truth but the affirmation of a conclusion already reached. The Renlunds were right to say so. And the LDS Discussions critique, for all its length and confidence, does not demonstrate otherwise.

Doctrine and Covenants 6:36

“Look unto me in every thought; doubt not, fear not.”

Primary Sources Referenced

• Renlund Devotional — “Doubt Not, but Be Believing,” Worldwide Devotional for Young Adults, BYU–Hawaii, January 13, 2019
• Gospel Topics Essays — Official Church essays on Book of Abraham, DNA and the Book of Mormon, Polygamy, Priesthood Ban, and First Vision accounts (ChurchofJesusChrist.org, 2013–2014)
• Joseph Smith Papers — Multi-volume scholarly publication of Joseph Smith’s original documents, funded and published by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
• William James — “The Will to Believe,” 1896, in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
• John A. Widtsoe — Evidences and Reconciliations, as cited in the Renlund devotional
• Alma 32 — Book of Mormon epistemology of faith as seed, experiment, and growth
• D&C 27:6–7 — Latter-day Saint theological distinction between Elias and Elijah