Clark

The Winnipeg Manitoba Temple was dedicated five years ago. Read more about the temple here: bit.ly/4hoRzdn

Dear John Dehlin, I owe you an apology. I was wrong about you. You were right about the history. The Book of Mormon is not a history of anyone. There is no steel, no horse, no chariot, no wheat, no Nephite city, no Lamanite gene, not one shard in the ground after two centuries of digging. The Church knew the evidence was not coming, so it changed the story. It rewrote the introduction, demoted the Lamanites from principal ancestors to a rumor, and published an essay teaching members to expect nothing. That is not faith. That is a retreat with footnotes. The Book of Abraham is a burial text for a dead priest named Hor. Joseph looked at it and dictated a prophet's autobiography. The Church's own essay admits the characters do not match a single word, and the Church still prints it as scripture. Joseph produced the Book of Mormon with his face in a hat, reading words off a rock he had once charged farmers to find buried treasure with, while the plates sat under a cloth or were not in the room. The Church knew. It commissioned painting after painting of a prophet with his finger on golden pages anyway. You were right about the First Vision. The earliest account, in Joseph's own hand, is from 1832, describes one being, and does not match the version every missionary memorizes. Someone cut those pages out of his letterbook, and the Church kept them in a vault until 1965. You were right about polygamy. Joseph took between thirty and forty wives. The first was a teenage girl living in his home, and his own second in command called it a dirty, nasty, filthy affair. About ten already had husbands. One was fourteen, and she wrote that she was told her family's salvation depended on her saying yes. When Emma objected, Joseph produced a revelation threatening her with destruction, and that threat is still canonized in Doctrine and Covenants 132. A month before he died he stood before the Saints and swore he had one wife. When a newspaper printed the truth, he had the press destroyed, and that is why he was in Carthage. The Church's essay concedes all of it. You were right about the system. The recommend interview asks whether you pay a full tithe. It does not ask whether you have fed anyone. A general authority taught from the pulpit that the destitute should pay tithing before they eat. Your own child's wedding is held behind a door that costs ten percent. And the church collecting that ten percent sits on a fund north of one hundred billion dollars that it hid behind thirteen shell companies for twenty years, with the approval of the First Presidency, because it feared what members would do if they saw the number. The SEC caught them in 2023. They paid the fine and blamed the lawyers. This is not a church that stumbled into secrecy. It bought documents it believed were damaging from a forger in the 1980s and locked them away. It ran a committee that kept files on its own members and named it Strengthening Church Members. So people find the truth at two in the morning on a laptop, alone, and then walk into church and are told they are the problem. Their bishop has a script for them. Their family has a label for them. I’m sorry.