Other Responses to the CES Letter
This is not the only answer to the CES Letter, and we would rather you had all of them. Here is what exists, who wrote it, and what each one is actually good for.
One of the CES Letter’s most effective moves is the impression that it stands unanswered. It does not, and it has not for a decade. The difficulty is that the replies are scattered across books, conference talks, a wiki, a Reddit series, a YouTube channel, and several PDFs — which means a person in the middle of a faith crisis has to already know what he is looking for in order to find it.
This page fixes that. Every item below is linked, and we have said plainly what each is best at and where it is weak. Some of these disagree with us on particulars. We are listing them anyway, because a reader who only ever sees one side of anything — including ours — has not actually investigated it.
If You Only Read One
Read Jim Bennett’s A CES Letter Reply: Faithful Answers for Those Who Doubt. It runs to roughly 372 pages and goes through the letter line by line, in order, in a conversational voice. Bennett concedes what deserves conceding — he does not pretend the hard parts are easy — which is precisely why the parts he does not concede carry weight. If you want one document that sits beside the letter and answers it paragraph by paragraph, this is it.
Book-Length Responses
| Work | Best for |
|---|---|
| Jim Bennett, A CES Letter Reply | The complete line-by-line walkthrough. Warm, candid, generous to the questions. Start here. |
| Michael R. Ash, Bamboozled by the CES Letter | A compact overview at about 91 pages. The fastest route to a broad answer when you do not have time for Bennett. |
| Sarah Allen, CES Letter response series | The most exhaustive treatment in existence — seventy installments, book-length in aggregate. Where to go when you want every detail on one claim. |
Reference Sites
- FAIR — Overview of the CES Letter — an index into brief and detailed responses organized by the letter’s own thirteen sections. The best place to look up one specific claim quickly.
- Mormonr — CES Letter — a deliberately neutral summary that presents how both sides characterize the document, with the primary sources attached. Useful precisely because it is not trying to persuade you.
- Brian Hales — video series — claim-by-claim video treatment from the leading documentary historian of Nauvoo plural marriage. Strongest on the polygamy material, where he knows the sources better than almost anyone.
- Gospel Topics Essays — not a response to the letter, but the Church’s own frank treatment of the seer stone, the First Vision accounts, the Book of Abraham, Nauvoo plural marriage, race and the priesthood, and Book of Mormon DNA. Short, sourced, and the first thing many readers should have seen.
Talks and Presentations
- Daniel C. Peterson, “Some Reflections on That Letter to a CES Director” (FAIR, 2014) — the earliest substantial reply, and still one of the clearest on how the letter frames its own case.
- Brian Hales, “The CES Letter: A Closer Look” (FAIR, 2016).
- Scott Gordon, “CES Letter: Proof or Propaganda?” (FAIR, 2019) — focused on method rather than on individual claims.
- René Krywult, “Fear Leads to the Dark Side” (FAIR, 2019) — on the emotional mechanics of a faith crisis rather than the evidence.
- Gregory L. Smith (2023) — a physician’s eye for how evidence gets selectively presented.
- David Snell, Third Hour (2019) — a short, plain-language introduction for someone who has just been handed the PDF.
On the Letter’s Origins
- Michael W. Peterson and Jacob Z. Hess, “Were these ever the sincere questions of an earnest truth seeker?” (Publish Peace, 2024) — a 68-page investigation of the letter’s composition, built from the author’s own public postings. Note that this argues about intent, which is a different kind of claim than the evidentiary ones; weigh it accordingly.
- Brian Hales and Michael Peterson, “The CES Letter’s Perfect Storm” (Public Square, 2024) — why 2013 in particular. Summarized on Why It Spread in 2013.
Video
- FAIR — CES Letter playlist
- Saints Unscripted — short, accessible episodes on individual issues, aimed at a younger audience.
Read the Letter Itself
We are not going to ask you to evaluate a document you have not read. The CES Letter is freely available from its author, and every page on this site quotes it directly before answering it so that you can check we have not softened anything. If you think we have stated a claim unfairly, go to the source and hold us to it. A response that can only survive against a weakened version of the argument is not worth having.
Where This Site Fits
Given all of the above, a fair question is what this site adds.
Three things. It is free and needs no download — no PDF, no purchase, no account, just a page you can reach from a phone at two in the morning, which is when people actually read this material. It is organized by concern rather than by the letter’s page order, so you can go straight to the thing troubling you without reading anything else. And it states a verdict on every page, including what remains genuinely unresolved, because a response that claims to have settled everything has told you something about itself.
Where Bennett, Ash, Allen, or Hales go deeper than we do on a specific point — and on several points they do — we would rather you went and read them. The object is not that you finish on this site. It is that you finish with an answer.
Further Study
- How the CES Letter Works — why the replies are so much longer than the letter.
- Where the CES Letter Came From — the lineage of the claims.
- Why It Spread in 2013 — the window that carried it.
Established: The CES Letter has been answered repeatedly and at length — a 372-page line-by-line reply, a seventy-part series, a wiki indexed to the letter’s own structure, conference presentations across a decade, and video treatments. The claim that no one has responded is not a claim about the record; it is a claim about what a reader happened to find first.
Conceded: Those answers arrived late, and they are scattered. A member in crisis in 2013 could not easily have found any of this, and a member in crisis today still has to know the names to search for. That is a genuine failure of accessibility, and it is most of the reason this page exists.
What it changes for you: You are not choosing between one document and silence. Read the letter. Then read Bennett beside it. Then come back to whichever claim still stands, and let us know — because if something on this site is wrong, we would rather hear it than keep it.