The Prophet's New Clothes: A Response

Examining the logical, theological, and historical failures in ldsdiscussions.com’s critique of President Nelson’s November 2020 gratitude message.

Overview of the Critique

On November 23, 2020, ldsdiscussions.com published “The Prophet’s New Clothes,” a blog post critiquing President Russell M. Nelson’s November 20, 2020 video message calling members and the world to participate in a week of gratitude using the hashtag #GiveThanks. The author frames this message—delivered amid the COVID-19 pandemic—as evidence that Nelson is a false prophet: a naked emperor dressed in imaginary prophetic robes by a credulous institution. The post’s central thesis is straightforward: a real prophet of God would have predicted the pandemic, mandated masks, healed the sick, and spoken in the voice of God rather than launching what the author dismisses as a “corporate marketing campaign.”

These are serious-sounding claims. They deserve serious answers. When examined carefully against scripture, history, theology, and the empirical record, however, each argument in the post collapses under the weight of its own assumptions. What the post actually reveals is not that President Nelson lacks prophetic clothing—but that the author is measuring prophets against a standard no biblical figure could satisfy, either.

Claim 1: A True Prophet Would Have Predicted COVID and Mandated Masks

The post insists that Nelson “failed to give any foresight in the Spring when knowledge of wearing masks would have been beyond helpful.” This is presented as disqualifying evidence. Before accepting that conclusion, we should ask: does the Bible’s prophetic record support this standard?

The Hebrew word nabi, translated “prophet,” is found roughly 350 times in the Old Testament. Of those references, fewer than half deal with predicting future events at all. The LDS Bible Dictionary is explicit on this point: “as a rule, [the prophet] was a forthteller rather than a foreteller.” The primary function of a prophet is to speak God’s word to his people in their present circumstances—to teach, to exhort, to call to repentance, and to testify of Christ. Predictive prophecy is a subset of that ministry, not its whole definition.

We may also ask: which biblical prophets accurately predicted pandemics so their people could take preventive medical action? Jeremiah did not predict the Black Death. Isaiah did not specify which Assyrian campaign to avoid. Ezekiel did not issue mask mandates during the siege of Jerusalem. Amos, Hosea, Micah—none of these figures functioned as divine epidemiologists. The author’s standard, rigorously applied, would disqualify every prophet in the entire Old Testament from being called of God.

Furthermore, the premise misunderstands the nature of conditional prophecy. Jeremiah 18:7–10 records God’s own explanation: warnings and blessings are conditioned on the response of the people. Jonah prophesied the destruction of Nineveh; Nineveh repented; the destruction did not come. Was Jonah a false prophet? By the author’s logic, yes. By any serious reading of scripture, obviously not.

“The moment I speak concerning a nation and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, to pull down, and to destroy it, if that nation against whom I have spoken turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I thought to bring upon it.” — Jeremiah 18:7–8 (NKJV)

The prophetic record is also not a silent record when it comes to COVID. The Church suspended in-person worship globally in March 2020—before many governments acted. Latter-day Saint Charities activated the largest humanitarian response in the organization’s history: more than 1,000 COVID-19 relief projects across over 150 countries, 5 million masks donated internationally, $5.5 million in direct cash relief to aid agencies, 26 million meals delivered to food banks across the United States, and $20 million contributed to the COVAX global vaccine initiative. The prophet of the Church may not have published a January 2020 pandemic forecast, but the institution he leads acted with remarkable speed and scale to care for the sick, the hungry, and the vulnerable.

Claim 2: The #GiveThanks Campaign Was “Just” Corporate Marketing

The post’s author states that he worked in marketing his “entire life” and therefore recognizes the #GiveThanks initiative as a marketing campaign in disguise. He treats the use of a hashtag, a linked website, and a social media call-to-action as proof that the message had no divine origin.

This is a category error of the first order. The ancient Psalms were the public media of their day. Psalm 107 begins: “Oh give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever! Let the redeemed of the Lord say so.” David’s proclamation when the Ark of the Covenant entered Jerusalem (1 Chronicles 16:8–11) was a public call to “proclaim his name, make known among the nations what he has done.” The prophetic genre of todah—the public thanksgiving proclamation—was a standard mode of prophetic ministry throughout the Old Testament. Were these ancient initiatives “marketing campaigns”? The form of a prophetic message—whether it uses a scroll, a herald, a hymn, or a hashtag—does not determine its divine origin.

More critically: the content of the message was not empty. Gratitude as a spiritual and physical remedy is one of the most robustly supported findings in modern psychology. Dr. Robert A. Emmons of the University of California, Davis—the world’s leading scientific researcher on gratitude—has published landmark peer-reviewed studies demonstrating that people who practice systematic gratitude show measurable improvements in psychological well-being, physical health, immune function, stress resilience, and social connection. Published research in the Journal of Happiness Studies (2022) found specifically that gratitude “lessened mental health difficulties and fostered positivity at the onset of the pandemic,” reducing both anxiety and depression symptom severity during COVID-19.

President Nelson—a physician who built his own heart-lung machine and performed the first successful open-heart surgery west of the Mississippi River, who performed more than 7,000 cardiac operations over 31 years—called the world to a practice that hard empirical science subsequently vindicated as precisely the psychological intervention the pandemic moment required. The author argues this is not prophetic because “any politician or TED talk presenter” could have said it. This proves too much. Jeremiah’s command to “seek the welfare of the city” could have been given by a civic administrator. Isaiah’s call to “comfort, comfort my people” resembles any grief counselor. The overlap between sound wisdom and divine counsel does not disqualify divine counsel.

Claim 3: Revelation Must Sound Like Joseph Smith or It Is Not Revelation

The post repeatedly contrasts modern prophets unfavorably with Joseph Smith’s ability to “talk in the voice of God off the top of his head,” implying that the relatively quieter prophetic style of modern leaders constitutes evidence against their calling. This argument founders on several grounds.

First, it anachronistically demands that all revelation look like the founding generation of any religious tradition. The Apostle Paul wrote epistles; he did not write new Torah. The second-century Church Fathers composed theological treatises; they did not produce new Gospels. Elijah’s still small voice (1 Kings 19:12) came after the wind and the earthquake—phenomena the author would presumably find more impressive. The mode of revelation adapts to its moment.

Second, the LDS doctrine of revelation has never held that every presidential statement is “thus saith the Lord” in dictated form. Joseph Smith himself taught that “a prophet was a prophet only when he was acting as such.” The LDS Church’s own official position is explicit: “Not every statement made by a Church leader, past or present, necessarily constitutes doctrine.” For a statement to constitute binding doctrinal revelation, it must be formally taught by the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve collectively, presented with prominence across multiple venues and publications, and ratified through the common consent of the membership. A midnight impression about a gratitude campaign does not meet—nor does it need to meet—that institutional threshold to constitute a prophetically inspired act.

Third, the suggestion that Nelson’s account of waking in the night to receive inspiration is “ridiculous” because God apparently cared more about a hashtag than a pandemic displays a fundamental misunderstanding of how LDS theology of revelation works. The impression was not that God prioritized marketing over medicine. It was that a leader whose institution was already mobilizing one of the largest humanitarian responses in its history was also prompted to address the psychological and spiritual crisis his people faced. Both responses—the food banks and the gratitude campaign—were happening simultaneously. The author presents a false either/or that the historical record does not support.

Claim 4: Revelations Always Conveniently Match the Prophet’s Worldview

The post’s most rhetorically confident claim is this: prophets’ revelations always happen to align with their pre-existing views, as demonstrated by Nelson’s “revelation” to discontinue using the word “Mormon”—a position he had advocated for during the presidencies of earlier prophets. Wendy Nelson’s remark that he is “free” to act on things he “could never do before” is offered as a smoking gun.

This argument proves too much, and it proves it symmetrically. If a prophet’s revelation conveniently aligns with his existing views, that is cited as evidence the revelation is fabricated. If a prophet’s revelation contradicts his existing views or introduces something unexpected, that evidence is simply ignored. The argument is unfalsifiable: whatever the prophet does, the critic can retroactively frame it as suspicious. This is not a falsifiable evidentiary standard. It is a rhetorical device.

Moreover, the premise is historically weak. The 1978 revelation extending full priesthood to all worthy male members came after decades of institutional resistance and was experienced by those present as a transformative and unexpected confirmation. Spencer W. Kimball did not advocate for this change his entire career; he agonized over it. President Wilford Woodruff explicitly opposed plural marriage for decades before receiving the Manifesto ending it. The pattern of revelation sometimes running against a prophet’s prior inclinations is well documented in LDS history.

The correlation between a prophet’s revelation and his general worldview is also, by itself, theologically unsurprising. God, in LDS theology, works with human instruments, not sterile automatons. D&C 9:7–8 describes the revelatory process as collaborative: “You must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right.” The prophet does not empty his mind before receiving revelation; he brings his experience, his understanding, and his concern to God, and God confirms or redirects. The fact that Nelson’s concern for the name of Christ in the Church’s title was validated by inspiration does not falsify the inspiration; it describes how inspiration works.

Claim 5: The Church’s Fasts Failed, Therefore Priesthood Authority Is No Greater Than Any Other

The post argues that the worldwide fasts of March 29 and April 10, 2020 did not end COVID-19, which “illustrates how this church’s exclusive claim to priesthood power in healing is no more effective than any other person or religion.”

This reasoning would equally disqualify every prayer ever offered, by any person, in any tradition, that was not immediately answered by the elimination of the problem prayed about. It would disqualify the prayers of Paul in prison, of Joseph in Egypt, of Christ in Gethsemane, who prayed “let this cup pass from me” and was not delivered from the Passion. It sets a standard for acceptable prayer—that it produce immediate, measurable, total resolution of the named problem—that no religious tradition on earth has ever satisfied, nor has any serious theology of prayer ever required.

The LDS theology of fasting and prayer has never included a guarantee that communal fasting will immediately end a pandemic. The purpose of a fast is to draw near to God, to align one’s will with His, to invite His sustaining power, and to express dependence and humility. Furthermore, the fasts were followed by a remarkable development: within months, multiple vaccine candidates were in advanced trials at unprecedented speed—vaccines that have since saved millions of lives by any credible estimate. The author declares the fasts failed; history records one of the most successful pharmaceutical development campaigns in human history occurring in the months that followed. Whether one attributes causation is a theological question. But declaring them simply “failed” is not the self-evident conclusion the author treats it as.

Claim 6: Nelson Cannot Be Both a Man of Science and a Prophet

The post concludes by arguing that Nelson’s self-description as a “man of science” is incompatible with his prophetic role, pointing to statements Nelson made about evolution in a Pew Research interview. This section of the critique, while distinct from the marketing argument, deserves direct treatment.

Russell M. Nelson’s medical credentials are extraordinary by any measure. He was a member of the team that developed one of the first cardiopulmonary bypass machines in the United States during his residency at the University of Minnesota under Clarence Dennis. Returning to the University of Utah in 1955, he built his own heart-lung machine and performed the first successful open-heart surgery in the American West. He performed one of the first-ever repairs of tricuspid valve regurgitation and maintained a mortality rate for aortic valve replacements in the 1960s that was exceptional by international standards. He performed over 7,000 operations in 31 years of surgical practice. The American College of Surgeons described him upon his death in 2025 as a “surgical pioneer.” His scientific bona fides in cardiothoracic medicine are beyond dispute.

The author’s charge rests on the claim that Nelson denied evolution. The Pew Research remark about species stability reflects a view common to many theists who accept microevolutionary processes while maintaining theistic accounts of human origins—a position held by significant numbers of credentialed scientists who are also people of faith. The claim that you cannot be both a scientist and a person who holds theistic beliefs about human origins requires its own defense, which the post does not provide. It asserts the incompatibility; it does not demonstrate it.

More fundamentally, this argument is a classic ad hominem. Even if Nelson held every view about biology that the author finds scientifically untenable, that would say nothing about whether his November 2020 call to gratitude was divinely inspired. These are separate questions. The attempt to fuse them is a rhetorical move, not a logical argument.

The Deeper Problem: An Unfalsifiable Standard

Reading the post in full, a pattern emerges that is more revealing than any individual argument. The author has constructed a standard for prophetic authenticity that no prophet in the biblical or LDS record could satisfy:

If the prophet speaks about spiritual matters: “That’s just religion, any minister could say that.” If the prophet speaks about practical matters: “That’s just common sense, any businessman could say that.” If the prophet’s revelation matches his prior views: “That’s just his personal agenda.” If the prophet acts through institutional channels: “That’s just corporate marketing.” If the prophet’s fasts are not followed by miraculous healing: “That proves he has no power.”

There is no action President Nelson could have taken in November 2020 that this author would have accepted as prophetic evidence. The conclusion was fixed before the evaluation began. This is not skepticism; it is motivated reasoning wearing the clothes of skepticism. The emperor’s new clothes metaphor the author invokes cuts both ways: it is equally possible to be so committed to seeing nakedness that one cannot perceive genuine fabric when it is present.

The LDS concept of a living prophet is not that a prophet is a supernatural prediction machine who broadcasts divine knowledge of every coming disaster. It is that a person called of God, sustained by a body of apostles, confirmed by the witness of the Spirit to millions of members, speaks the word of the Lord in the context of his people’s present need. By that measure, calling a pandemic-weary world to gratitude—a call subsequently vindicated by peer-reviewed research as precisely what the psychological moment required—looks far less like an emperor with no clothes and far more like a shepherd who knows his flock.

Conclusion

The ldsdiscussions.com post “The Prophet’s New Clothes” is an emotionally resonant piece of writing. Its author clearly experienced a painful faith transition, and that experience deserves respect. But the strength of an argument is measured by its logic, its historical accuracy, and its consistency—not by the sincerity with which it is held.

On those measures, the post fails. It demands of modern prophets a standard of predictive, miraculous, audible-voice-of-God prophecy that no canonical prophet satisfies. It dismisses as “marketing” a call to a practice science has now confirmed was therapeutically appropriate for the pandemic moment. It constructs an unfalsifiable rhetorical trap in which any prophetic act can be explained away. It misunderstands the LDS theology of revelation, the distinction between official doctrine and personal inspiration, and the institutional record of the Church’s actual COVID-19 response.

The emperor, in this telling, is not naked. The author simply arrived at the parade determined not to see any clothes.

Sources and Further Reading

FAIR Latter-day Saints — Modern Prophets and Prophecy

FAIR Latter-day Saints — Fallibility of Prophets

LDS Bible Dictionary — Prophet

Emmons, R. A. & McCullough, M. E. (2003) — Counting Blessings Versus Burdens (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology)

Lathren et al. (2022) — Does Gratitude Promote Resilience During a Pandemic? (Journal of Happiness Studies)

American College of Surgeons (2025) — Surgical Pioneer Turned Faith Leader Dies at Age 101

Deseret News (2021) — Church Humanitarian Aid in 2020: More Than 1,000 COVID-19 Relief Projects

Church Newsroom — Latter-day Saint Charities Boosts Global Efforts in 2020

The Church News (2020) — President Nelson invites the world to #GiveThanks