Follow the Footnotes: A Response to ldsdiscussions.com
Examining the ten citations ldsdiscussions.com calls “deceptive” — and why the charges do not survive scrutiny.
Overview
In August 2020, ldsdiscussions.com published “Follow the Footnotes,” ranking ten citations from the Church’s Gospel Topics Essays and manuals as “deceptive,” “dishonest,” and “intentionally misleading.” The article has circulated widely in faith-crisis communities and is regularly cited as evidence that the Church cannot be trusted to represent its own sources accurately.
This response examines each of the ten claims in detail. In every case, we find that the ldsdiscussions.com characterization either misreads the source being cited, applies an unfair interpretive standard, suppresses relevant context that favors the Church’s position, or conflates honest scholarly complexity with deliberate fraud. A footnote that acknowledges nuance is not a self-refutation. A quotation that does not include every sentence of its source is not automatically a lie. And a contested historical question is not settled simply by asserting that one side has already lost.
We address each claim in the order presented in the original article, from #10 to #1.
Claim 10 — Book of Abraham: “Extrabiblical Elements” Footnote Contradicts the Essay
ldsdiscussions.com argues that footnote 46 of the Book of Abraham essay undermines the essay’s own claim that certain extrabiblical elements “were confined to nonbiblical traditions inaccessible or unknown to 19th-century Americans.” Because the footnote acknowledges that some parallels were available in Jasher and Josephus, the article concludes the entire argument collapses.
This is a misreading. The essay itself explicitly states that only some extrabiblical elements were available in accessible sources while others were not. Footnote 46 transparently acknowledges this distinction — which is exactly what a rigorous, honest footnote should do. The fact that Terah’s idolatry appears in Jasher does not automatically explain the full range of specific parallels scholars have identified between the Book of Abraham and ancient Semitic and Egyptian traditions. Scholars including John Gee and Matthew Grey have documented parallels to texts that Joseph Smith demonstrably could not have accessed, including documents discovered in the twentieth century — the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Genesis Apocryphon (1QapGen), and the Apocalypse of Abraham, none of which were available in 1835.
The claim that Adam Clarke’s Bible commentary “contains many of these extrabiblical stories” and that Joseph “unquestionably would have known” it is stated as settled fact. It is not. The Adam Clarke connection to the Joseph Smith Translation was advanced as a hypothesis by Haley and Thomas Wilson; it remains actively contested among scholars. Even granting some influence on the JST, the question of whether Clarke’s commentary provides sufficient explanation for the full range of Book of Abraham parallels is precisely the question that has not been answered.
A footnote that names available sources while pointing to inaccessible ones is the model of transparency. It is not self-refutation.
Claim 9 — Polygamy Essay: “Carefully Worded Denials” Are Evidence of Fraud
The article argues that footnote 22 of the Kirtland/Nauvoo polygamy essay exposes the phrase “carefully worded denials” as an admission of deception. Because the footnote explains that “polygamy” was understood to mean marriage without Church sanction, ldsdiscussions.com insists Joseph was simply “lying” via semantic technicality.
The Bill Clinton comparison is rhetorically effective but analytically weak. Clinton’s famous statement was a legal denial designed to mislead a grand jury about conduct that was not religiously commanded or theologically defined differently by any recognized tradition. The situation with nineteenth-century plural marriage is genuinely more complex. The theological and legal category of “celestial marriage” as a divinely-commanded covenant was not a convenient legal loophole invented in the moment; it was a fully-developed doctrinal framework articulated in D&C 132 and practiced by hundreds of members who understood the distinction.
LDS historian Brian Hales, who has written the most comprehensive scholarly treatment of Joseph Smith’s plural marriages, acknowledges the denials but notes that Joseph and other leaders understood they were denying an illegal practice that existed in a separate theological category from the public understanding of the word “polygamy.” This is not an exoneration — reasonable people can conclude the denials were wrong — but it is a different claim than conscious fraud. The essay does not hide this; it names the practice “carefully worded,” which is precisely an acknowledgment of the semantic complexity. A footnote that explains the theological distinction rather than obscuring it is not deceptive.
The essay was approved by the First Presidency not despite this acknowledgment but with it. Transparency about a difficult history is the opposite of the cover-up the article implies.
Claim 8 — Book of Abraham Essay: The Leiden Papyrus (P. Leiden I 384)
The article claims that the essay’s citation of P. Leiden I 384 as a “third-century papyrus that connects Abraham with an illustration similar to facsimile 1” is dishonest because the papyrus is a love spell depicting a woman, not Abraham.
The article presents John Gee’s own acknowledgment that the papyrus “tells us nothing directly about Abraham” as a devastating concession. But this quote actually supports the essay’s more modest claim — not that the papyrus proves the Book of Abraham, but that it provides a connection between the lion-couch motif and Abraham’s name in an ancient context. The essay states the papyrus “connects Abraham with an illustration similar to facsimile 1” — which is accurate. The Leiden papyrus does contain the name Abraham alongside a lion-couch scene. That it also contains other elements does not erase the relevant iconographic and onomastic connection the essay points to.
The broader point is that the presence of Abraham’s name alongside lion-couch imagery in a third-century Egyptian ritual context is precisely the kind of ancient cultural linkage that supports the Book of Abraham’s plausibility. LDS scholar Kerry Muhlestein has published extensively on the Egyptian ritual context for human sacrifice depicted in facsimile 1, demonstrating that such scenes were known in ancient Egypt. The Leiden papyrus is one of multiple pieces of evidence in a cumulative case — not a singular proof, and never claimed to be.
The article misreads the essay’s careful wording (“similar to,” “connects”) and replaces it with a stronger claim it can more easily refute. That is a straw man, not a footnote analysis.
Claim 7 — Polygamy Essay: Children and Plural Marriage
The article argues that the essay’s statement — “Plural marriage did result in an increased number of children born to believing parents” — is an “untruth” because the Utah essay footnote states that monogamous wives bore more children per wife than polygamous wives except the first.
This objection confuses individual fertility rates with aggregate population outcomes, and the distinction matters. The essay’s claim is about the total number of children born to believing parents — a population-level statement — not about per-wife fertility. Both things can be true simultaneously: individual plural wives may have fewer children on average than their monogamous counterparts, and the overall number of children born into faithful LDS families increased because plural marriage dramatically increased the marriage rate for women in Utah Territory. Demographic historians have documented exactly this dynamic in polygynous populations: lower per-wife fertility but higher aggregate population growth due to near-universal marriage.
Furthermore, the Utah essay footnote the article cites specifically says monogamous wives bore more children “except the first” wife in a plural household — meaning the first wife in a plural marriage had comparable or higher fertility. The essay’s statement is therefore supported by the very citation the article claims refutes it.
This is not a “non-truth.” It is a careful population-level claim that is, in fact, accurate.
Claim 6 — DNA Essay: The Mal’ta Migration Citation
The essay states that “Scientists do not rule out the possibility of additional, small-scale migrations to the Americas,” citing a study involving the Mal’ta boy’s genome. ldsdiscussions.com argues this is misleading because the Mal’ta DNA dates to 24,000 years ago, well before Book of Mormon times.
The logical structure of this objection is flawed. The essay does not claim the Mal’ta boy’s specific lineage is related to Lehi. The citation is used to establish the more general scientific principle that migration models for the Americas remain open — that is, that the peopling of the Americas was not a single monolithic event about which all questions are closed. That is an accurate representation of the scientific literature. Scientists actively debate the number, timing, and geographic origin of migration waves into the Americas, and this debate has intensified with ongoing ancient DNA research.
The more substantive DNA challenge to the Book of Mormon is the absence of detectable Near Eastern haplogroups among indigenous American populations — and the Church’s essay addresses this directly by noting that a small founding group’s genetic signal could be swamped and lost within a larger indigenous population. Population geneticist Simon Southerton, frequently cited by critics, acknowledges that detecting such a signal would be statistically very difficult even if it existed. The essay is not claiming DNA proves the Book of Mormon; it is mapping the limits of what DNA evidence can and cannot rule out. That is a defensible and scientifically accurate position.
The citation to the Mal’ta study supports the general principle of ongoing migration research — a principle that is not disputed in population genetics.
Claim 5 — Lorenzo Snow Manual: “Who Has Means”
The article argues that the Church removed the phrase “who has means” from Lorenzo Snow’s 1899 tithing statement in order to deceive members into thinking tithing was required of those who cannot afford it.
This claim rests on an interpretive dispute about the phrase “who has means.” In nineteenth-century American English, “means” commonly referred to “income” or “financial resources” in a general sense — the equivalent of “who has any income” — rather than specifically to those who are prosperous enough to spare money after basic needs. Snow’s statement, read in its full conference context, was addressed to a congregation of working settlers in southern Utah during a period of economic hardship; his intent was to call the entire body of members to a principle, not to exempt those with modest incomes.
Moreover, the Church’s actual current pastoral practice on tithing explicitly acknowledges that members in genuine hardship are not expected to pay at the expense of necessities. This has been taught from the pulpit and in bishops’ interviews for generations. The existence of a pastoral exception — which is real and practiced — is not contradicted by the manual’s formulation. Editing a historical quote for clarity in a teaching manual without intending to alter doctrine is standard practice in every religious tradition that compiles teaching materials from historical sources.
The charge of “deceptive” editing requires demonstrating intent to deceive — a standard the article does not meet. Applying the charitable interpretation its own faith tradition demands, this is editorial streamlining of an ambiguous phrase, not fraud.
Claim 4 — Come Follow Me 2020: The Joseph Fielding Smith Ellipsis
The article presents the 2020 Come Follow Me manual’s use of ellipses in a quote from Joseph Fielding Smith about the curse of dark skin as a deliberate concealment of racist content. The full original quote contains deeply offensive statements about Lamanites “losing the dark pigment” and converts becoming “delightsome.”
Several important facts bear on this claim. First, when Church leaders became aware of the printed manual’s content in late 2019, the Joseph Fielding Smith quotation was immediately removed from the online version — which is what the majority of members use. The Church acknowledged publicly that the material was not consistent with current doctrine. Second, the manual was prepared nearly two years in advance of publication; no malicious editing chain with intent to deceive has been established. Third, the truncated version, which focuses on the “withdrawal of the Spirit of the Lord” as the curse rather than skin color, could just as reasonably be seen as an attempt to move away from a racial reading of the text.
The cover-up hypothesis requires that the Church wanted members to encounter the racist content. But the edited version contains less of the offensive material, not more. And the Church’s rapid public response to the printed-manual controversy is inconsistent with an institution engaged in systematic deception on this question.
Curriculum writers routinely condense historical quotes for lesson manuals. The question is whether the condensed version changes the doctrinal message in a way that misleads readers. That question admits reasonable disagreement; the article’s confident conclusion of deliberate fraud does not.
Claim 3 — Book of Abraham Essay: The Warren Parrish Citation
The article argues that the Book of Abraham essay’s citation of Warren Parrish — who wrote that he “penned down the translation of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics as [Joseph] claimed to receive it by direct inspiration of Heaven” — is deceptive because Parrish was a hostile critic and the same letter condemns Joseph as a fraud.
This objection confuses the content of a historical claim with the motive of the person making it. Historians regularly cite hostile witnesses precisely because their testimony about facts is more credible when it runs counter to their agenda. Parrish wanted readers to believe Joseph Smith was a false prophet. His admission that the translation process looked like revelation — “by direct inspiration of Heaven” — is therefore more compelling as evidence of the method Joseph used, not less. A loyal follower describing the same scene would carry less evidentiary weight.
The essay is not presenting Parrish as a credible endorsement of Joseph’s prophetic calling. It is using Parrish’s firsthand description of the method of translation — a description Parrish never disputed even as he condemned Joseph. That an enemy of Joseph Smith was present and witnessed what he described as a revelatory process is precisely the kind of corroboration a careful historian values.
The ldsdiscussions.com article asks readers to dismiss a citation because the source later became a critic — a principle that would, by that same logic, also require dismissing every critical source used by ldsdiscussions.com itself, since nearly all of its sources have an agenda. Hostile-witness testimony is not automatically invalid; in many cases it is the most valuable kind.
Claim 2 — Polygamy Essay: Biblical Citations for Plural Marriage
The article argues that the essay’s claim — “In biblical times, the Lord commanded some of His people to practice plural marriage” — is improperly footnoted because the sources include D&C 132 and Jacob 2:30 rather than exclusively biblical texts, and because D&C 132 contradicts the Genesis account of Hagar.
This objection rests on a category error. The essay’s phrase “biblical times” refers to a historical period, not to a set of canonical texts. D&C 132 is cited as Joseph Smith’s revealed explanation of events that occurred during the biblical era — an entirely normal theological citation structure in LDS documents. No reader of the Gospel Topics Essays is unaware that D&C 132 is not itself a biblical book; the citation is transparent.
The claim that D&C 132 “contradicts” Genesis 16 on Hagar misrepresents both texts. Genesis 16:1–3 says Sarah gave Hagar to Abraham; D&C 132:34–35 says God gave Hagar to Abraham through Sarah. These two accounts describe the same event from the human and divine vantages respectively — a standard theological interpretive move that any student of Scripture would recognize.
As for Jacob 2:30’s conditional permission for plural marriage to “raise up righteous seed,” the essay cites it precisely because it establishes the scriptural basis for the exception — the condition under which God commands what is otherwise prohibited. The ldsdiscussions.com article does not dispute that Jacob 2:30 contains this conditional clause; it disputes whether the condition was met. That is a theological argument, not a citation problem.
Claim 1 — Race and Priesthood Essay: The Brigham Young Citation
The article identifies the Race and the Priesthood essay’s citation of Brigham Young — that black members would “have [all] the privilege and more” — as the most “intentionally deceptive” footnote in all the essays, because the full speech conditions that promise on eschatological events that have not and may never occur.
Let us begin with what the essay actually does. The essay explicitly repudiates Brigham Young’s justifications for the priesthood ban. It states that “the Church today disavows the theories advanced in the past that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse.” It identifies the origin of the ban not in revelation but in the historical and cultural milieu of the nineteenth century. This is the most direct institutional repudiation of a prior policy the Church has ever made publicly. The essay is not defending Young’s theology; it is distancing from it.
The citation of Young’s promise that black members would eventually receive full privileges is used not to rehabilitate his racist framework but to show that even within that historical context, the eventual reversal was foreshadowed. The 1978 revelation is presented by the essay as the fulfillment of the promise, without requiring every eschatological condition Young attached to be met. The promise was extended by revelation; the conditions Young attached were his own theological framework, which the essay explicitly disavows.
The article does not grapple with this interpretive possibility. It assumes that Young’s full speech is normative LDS doctrine which the Church is hiding. But the entire purpose of the Race and Priesthood essay is to say the opposite: that Young’s speech is not normative doctrine and should be understood as the product of its time, not as prophetic revelation. The Church’s selective quotation is not concealment — it is consonant with the essay’s own thesis that Young’s racial theology was wrong and that only the promise of ultimate equality endures.
Brigham Young’s February 5, 1852 speech is not hidden. It is available in the University of Utah’s digital archives. Any reader who follows the footnote can find it. The essay does not tell readers the speech says something it does not say; it selects the one line that survived the broader theological revision the essay itself announces. That is not deception. That is how institutional repentance of prior error is communicated.
The Standard Applied
ldsdiscussions.com closes its article by quoting Apostle James Talmage: “The man who cannot listen to an argument which opposes his views either has a weak position or is a weak defender of it.” We agree entirely. We also note that Talmage’s standard applies to the analysis itself. Following the footnotes is an excellent discipline — provided one reads them with the same critical rigor applied to the institution being criticized.
In each of the ten cases examined above, the ldsdiscussions.com analysis relies on at least one of the following moves:
Methodological Problems in the ldsdiscussions.com Analysis
- Straw man citations — Attributing stronger claims to the essay than the essay actually makes, then refuting the stronger claim
- Motive inflation — Treating every editorial decision as evidence of deliberate fraud rather than honest condensation
- Level confusion — Conflating individual-level statistics with population-level claims (polygamy fertility)
- Hostile witness fallacy — Treating the critical context of a source as disqualifying factual content that favors the cited claim
- Ignoring the essay’s own disavowals — Claiming the Race essay conceals Young’s theology while ignoring its explicit repudiation of that theology
- Settled-question fallacy — Presenting active scholarly debates (Book of Abraham, DNA, Adam Clarke) as already resolved against the Church
None of this means the Gospel Topics Essays are perfect documents. They are not. Scholars across the ideological spectrum have noted areas where additional nuance was warranted, where more primary sources could have been cited, and where the pastoral framing shaped the historical presentation. The essays are institutional documents written for a broad audience; they carry the limitations of that genre.
But “imperfect” is not “deceptive.” “Condensed” is not “fraudulent.” And “contested” is not “settled.” The ten examples ldsdiscussions.com presents as irrefutable proof of institutional dishonesty are, examined carefully, ten examples of the inherent complexity of communicating contested history to general audiences — a challenge that every religious institution, every historical museum, and every university press faces.
The Church’s Gospel Topics Essays represent an unprecedented level of openness about difficult subjects; the footnotes they provide, including the ones criticized here, point readers toward sources that allow further investigation. That is, quite literally, the opposite of a cover-up.
Doctrine and Covenants 88:118
“Seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith.”
Follow the footnotes. All of them. Including the ones that point to FAIR Latter-day Saints, to BYU Studies, to the Interpreter Foundation, to Kerry Muhlestein, to Brian Hales, and to the primary sources cited in the Gospel Topics Essays themselves. The picture that emerges is not a Church hiding behind misleading citations. It is an institution navigating genuinely complex history with more transparency than its critics acknowledge — and with considerably more scholarly support than ldsdiscussions.com is willing to admit.
Study and faith are not enemies. Following the footnotes in a spirit of genuine inquiry — reading the sources the Church cites, reading the scholars the Church’s apologists engage, and reading the critics with the same rigor applied to the believers — leads not to the conclusion that the Church is engaged in systematic deception, but to the conclusion that these are hard questions that deserve better answers than either dismissal or despair.