A Latter-day Saint Response to the CES Letter

Jeremy Runnells asked his questions in public. This site answers them in public — one claim at a time, with the sources on the table.

Before anything else — what this site is

This is not the CES Letter. This site is not written, run, or endorsed by Jeremy Runnells. It has no affiliation with him, with cesletter.org, or with the CES Letter Foundation. If you came here looking for his document, you are in the wrong place — and the right place is one click away.

The CES Letter — originally Letter to a CES Director — is a document Jeremy Runnells wrote in 2013 laying out his reasons for doubting the truth claims of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is published in full, free, at his own site. Read it there, in his words, unedited, before you read anyone’s answer to it:

Read the CES Letter at read.cesletter.org — the author’s own site →

This site is the reply. We quote his argument, put the primary documents beside it, and say plainly where each claim lands — including the places where he has a point. Nothing here works unless you can check it, so every page is built to be checked.

The Response He Was Promised

Jeremy Runnells was invited to write down his doubts for a director of the Church Educational System, and was told he would get a response. By his account, he never did. That silence is the single most effective thing the CES Letter has going for it. A question that goes unanswered for a decade starts to look unanswerable.

It is not. Every section of the letter is worked through here, in order, at length. Some of his claims collapse the moment the source is read in full. Some rest on a real historical problem that Latter-day Saints have no business pretending away — and those are marked as such, on the page, in bold. A defense that has to hide something is not a defense worth having.

What the letter does not survive is the cumulative case it wants to make: that the weight of all of it together proves the Restoration false. Read claim by claim, against the documents, that weight does not hold.

How Every Page Here Is Built

The menu mirrors the structure of the CES Letter itself. Start wherever the question that brought you here lives, or read straight through. Each page runs the same four moves, in the same order:

The Claim — the CES Letter’s argument, in the strongest form we can state it. Where the block is a direct quotation it is labelled as one; where we are summarizing his argument in our own words, the block says so.
The Evidence — what the record actually contains, cited so you can go look.
The Response — why the claim fails, or what the fuller picture is, or what it proves that is smaller than what it was asked to prove.
The Verdict — two headings, always: what is established, and what remains open. If something is genuinely unresolved, it is listed under the second heading rather than buried in a paragraph.

Start here if you are new

How the CES Letter Works — why eighty pages of rapid-fire objections feels unanswerable even when each one has an answer.
Where the CES Letter Came From — the claims are mostly not new, and knowing their provenance tells you where to look for the answers.
Other Responses to the CES Letter — this site is not the only reply, and it is not the longest. Here is everyone else’s, with what each is best for.

The Standard We Hold Ourselves To

Engage the strongest version of the argument, not the easiest one. Quote the source, not a summary of the source. Name the document, the date, and the page. Concede what is true. Say “open” when it is open. And never win a paragraph by making the other side stupid — the questions in the CES Letter are the questions serious people ask, and treating them as anything less is how a defense loses the only reader who matters.

That reader is not Jeremy Runnells. It is the member sitting up at 2 a.m. with a PDF open, wondering whether anyone on the other side has actually read it. Someone has. This is what they found.

Jeremy Runnells asked good questions. The Gospel of Jesus Christ has good answers. Both of those things are true at once, and this site is written on the assumption that you are capable of holding them together while you check the footnotes.

“CES Letter” is the title of Jeremy Runnells’ document and is used here solely to identify the work being discussed. This site is an independent commentary and response. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Jeremy Runnells, cesletter.org, the CES Letter Foundation, or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. See About.