Church History and Selective Disclosure

The CES Letter reaches for two editorial choices in devotional manuals and one scripture header and asks them to prove that the Church systematically hides its past. The problem is not that the examples are false. The problem is what Jeremy asks them to mean — and the far better-supported reading he stepped around to get there.

The Claims

The CES Letter’s Argument

A Church manual on Zina Diantha Huntington Young omits that she was one of Joseph Smith’s plural wives. The Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Brigham Young manual changed Brigham Young’s own words from “wives” to “[wife].” The 2013 header to Official Declaration 2 now admits that “Church records offer no clear insights into the origins of this practice” — against a century of confident prophetic statements.

Taken together, the argument runs, this is a pattern: the Church whitewashes and sanitizes its own history to keep members in the dark.

Take the three examples at their strongest. The Zina omission is real. The bracketed edit is real. The Official Declaration 2 header really does say what Jeremy quotes. A faithful answer that pretended otherwise would be doing exactly what the CES Letter accuses the Church of doing. So we concede every fact. The entire question is the inference — and that is where a fork opens.

The Fork Jeremy Chose

Standing in front of these three data points, an honest investigator faces a genuine choice of readings.

The path Jeremy took — the synecdoche. Treat a lesson-manual edit as a window into the institution’s deepest intent. If a curriculum writer will simplify “wives” to “[wife],” then the institution behind that writer is fundamentally in the business of deception, and every closed archive drawer confirms it. One editorial bracket becomes the whole Church.

The path he stepped around — the genre distinction. A Sunday School manual is a genre: a topical, devotional teaching aid written for a lay congregation, never presented as biography or as a work of history. The honest test of an institution’s candor is not what it does in its lesson books but what it does in the venues that actually claim to be about history — its archives, its scholarly editions, its canon of scripture. Apply that test and the answer inverts.

Why is the second reading better supported? Because the same institution, in the very same years it was tidying a lesson manual, was doing the opposite of hiding in every venue that counts. By the time the CES Letter first appeared in the spring of 2013, the Church had already opened its History Library to outside researchers, funded and published a critical scholarly edition of Joseph Smith’s own papers, and let its own historians publish an unflinching book on the worst atrocity in its history. You cannot square those acts with a covert program of concealment. Jeremy’s reading requires you to weigh a lesson manual and discard the archive. The evidence runs the other way.

Response

1. The strongest form of the objection — and it deserves a real answer

The weakest version of Jeremy’s complaint is “a manual left something out.” Every teacher leaves something out. That version answers itself. So let us state the objection at full strength, the way a careful skeptic would:

The “[wife]” edit is not an omission. It is an active alteration of a primary quotation. Someone took Brigham Young’s recorded words and changed their meaning inside the very brackets that are supposed to signal editorial honesty. And it appeared not in the 1950s but in a manual published in 1997 and used for years afterward — in the same modern era when the Church insists it is being transparent. That is the objection worth answering.

Here is the honest answer. The Teachings of Presidents series uses square brackets throughout as a standard editorial device — adapting nineteenth-century phrasing, clarifying pronouns, and rendering old quotations usable in a lesson built around a single doctrinal theme. In a chapter teaching the principles of marriage and family to a monogamous membership that has not practiced plural marriage for well over a century, the bracket pulls a historical quotation into the frame of the lesson. One can fairly argue that this particular bracket obscured more than it clarified; it is a defensible target for criticism of editorial judgment. Take the objection at its strongest: the bracket did not conceal Brigham Young’s own marriages so much as it smoothed away a passing reference to plural marriage as a lived nineteenth-century practice — a quiet normalization of the monogamous present that erases the polygamous past from view. What that reading cannot survive is the plain fact that the same institution had already documented the history of plural marriage openly and in detail — Brigham Young’s many wives among them — in reference works published under its own auspices before this manual ever appeared. The Church-sponsored Encyclopedia of Mormonism (1992) treated plural marriage at length and named Joseph Smith’s own participation in print, and the Church’s scholarly and archival output carried the fuller record throughout the very years the manual was in use. An organization does not simultaneously erase a practice from a lesson book and document it at length in the reference works it publishes under its own name. The two acts only make sense once you accept that a manual and an archive are different genres doing different jobs.

2. What a devotional manual is — and is not

The Teachings of Presidents of the Church volumes open by telling the reader exactly what they are: collections of teachings on gospel principles, arranged by topic for personal and classroom study, explicitly not comprehensive biographies. Judging such a book for failing to be a scholarly life of its subject is like faulting a hymnbook for omitting the composers’ financial records. It was never the instrument for that.

Every religious tradition simplifies for devotional teaching. Catholic catechetical materials do not lead with the Borgia popes. Protestant lesson books on Martin Luther do not open with his later polemics. This is not a Latter-day Saint peculiarity and it is not fraud; it is the nature of curriculum. The test of honesty is whether the fuller record is available somewhere the institution controls — and for the Church, it demonstrably is.

The strongest form of Jeremy’s complaint presses exactly here, and it deserves to be stated in full rather than sidestepped: the correlated curriculum — the manuals, the Ensign, general conference — is what nearly every member actually consumes, while the scholarly editions and archival volumes are read mostly by specialists. Shunting the hard material into Oxford University Press books, the objection runs, does not reach the pew. That is a fair observation about reach, and the answer is not to deny it but to separate reach from concealment. A fact the Church publishes openly, under its own name, findable by any member who looks, is disclosed — even when the Sunday manual has not yet caught up to it. What Jeremy’s systemic charge needs is a locked door; what the record shows is an open shelf that the curriculum is still, unevenly, learning to point toward. That gap is real, and section 6 returns to it — but it is a gap of pedagogy and pace, not of a cover-up.

3. Zina Young and the missing sealing

Zina Diantha Huntington Young was a formidable figure — midwife, silk-industry pioneer, and third General President of the Relief Society. A Relief Society history that presents her leadership without cataloguing that she had been sealed to Joseph Smith is following the same topical logic as every other devotional treatment: the lesson is about her ministry, not her marital history.

But notice where the fuller story of Zina Young actually lives: in the Church’s own scholarly and historical output, where her sealing to Joseph Smith is documented and discussed openly. The information Jeremy says was hidden was published — by the Church — in the venues built to carry it. For a fuller treatment of Zina and the women whose lives run through this history, see Women in Church History.

4. Official Declaration 2 — the header that argues against Jeremy

The third claim is the most revealing, because it quietly undoes the first two. Jeremy points to the introductory header the Church added to Official Declaration 2, which states that during Joseph Smith’s lifetime a few black men were ordained to the priesthood, and that “Church records offer no clear insights into the origins of this practice” of later restriction.

Read that again. The Church printed, into its own standard works, a candid acknowledgment that the documentary origins of the priesthood restriction are not clearly recorded — and that some early black members were ordained. That is one of the least “whitewashed” sentences a church could publish about its own hardest chapter. It sits not in an obscure essay but in the canon read by every member. An institution bent on sanitizing its history does not print self-critical candor into its published standard works.

What of the tension with confident nineteenth-century statements about the restriction? Here the faithful reading is not embarrassment but the ordinary shape of revealed religion. Divine callings are administered by mortal leaders who see through the lens of their own century. Jesus Himself described how the Lord accommodates human limitation across time: “Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so” (Matthew 19:8). A true principle can be administered within the cultural understanding of an era and later clarified when the Lord speaks again — for “we believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God” (Articles of Faith 1:9). The 1978 revelation is that later word. The header itself makes no sweeping confession; it says candidly only that the documentary origins of the restriction are unrecorded and that some early black members were ordained. Read through the accommodation principle above, one can fairly conclude that the confident nineteenth-century explanations reflected the understanding of their authors more than a revealed decree — but that is a theological reading offered here, not a claim the canonized text makes. What the header does demonstrate is a body willing to print, into its own standard works, that it does not possess a tidy origin story for its hardest chapter.

Jeremy files this under “whitewashing.” But the header reads more naturally the other way. To make it serve the concealment thesis, it has to be treated as a contradiction rather than as the candid admission it plainly is — and that is simply not the reading the text best supports.

5. The record that was already open before the CES Letter existed

The CES Letter first circulated in the spring of 2013. It matters that we do not rest this answer on anything that came later — the Gospel Topics Essays, for instance, began appearing only in late 2013, so they cannot be said to have “pre-empted” the Letter. We do not need them. The disclosure case stands entirely on what the Church had already published before Jeremy wrote a word:

  • The Joseph Smith Papers Project — a Church-funded critical edition begun under senior leadership, with its first volume in print by 2008 and its documents freely online by 2009, placing Joseph’s revelations, journals, and Nauvoo records — polygamy and all — into the hands of professional historians and the public.
  • The Church History Library — dedicated in 2009 and opened to outside researchers under professional archival standards, the institutional reversal of the mid-century closed-stacks era.
  • Massacre at Mountain Meadows (Oxford University Press, 2008) — written by Church historians, including an Assistant Church Historian, giving an unsparing account of the 1857 atrocity. A church that hides its history does not commission its own staff to document its worst day.
  • The Encyclopedia of Mormonism (1992) — produced under Church auspices at Brigham Young University, with entries that treated plural marriage and acknowledged Joseph Smith’s own participation in print — two decades before the CES Letter.

This is the material the “keeps members in the dark” charge has to ignore. The candor of the Mountain Meadows scholarship is treated at length in The Mountain Meadows Massacre, and the broader question of whether the Church discourages honest inquiry is taken up in Does the Church Suppress Truth-Seeking?

6. The restrictive era was real — and the trajectory left it behind

A faithful answer need not pretend the twentieth century was uniformly open. There was a period, roughly the 1970s through the early 1990s, when archival access was tightened and some leaders were wary of independent historians. That tension is documented — and it is the backdrop to the disciplinary actions of 1993, several of which involved historians and writers. That episode has its own honest treatment on this site in Discipline, Dissent, and the September Six.

The relevant question is direction. Freeze the Church at its most cautious moment and call that its nature, and you get the CES Letter’s portrait. Watch the actual movement of the past twenty-five years — open library, published papers, candid scholarship, self-critical scripture headers, and the Saints narrative history that names difficulties earlier volumes passed over — and you get an institution moving unmistakably toward disclosure, not away from it. Jeremy’s case depends on holding the clock still.

Verdict

Resolved. The three examples are factually accurate, and three examples do not make a system. Each is a curriculum or canonical-editing decision, and the honest test of institutional candor — what the Church does in its archives, its scholarship, and its scripture — comes back overwhelmingly on the side of disclosure, and did so before the CES Letter was written. The Official Declaration 2 header, far from proving concealment, is one of the most transparent statements the Church has ever printed into its published standard works. Jeremy chose to read a lesson-manual bracket as the key to the whole institution; the better-supported reading is that a manual is not an archive, and the archive was already open.

Mildly open. One honest tension remains, and it is small. Devotional simplification, defensible in itself, can leave a member feeling they learned the fuller story late and from a critic rather than from a teacher. That is a real pastoral cost, and it is worth the Church’s continued attention to close the gap between what its scholars publish and what its Sunday classes teach. But a pastoral cost is not a conspiracy, and a bracket in a manual is not a cover-up. The distance between those two claims is the distance between the path Jeremy took and the one the evidence actually supports.

Further Study