The CES Letter: What It Is, What It Claims, and Where Every Answer Lives

The most influential critique of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints written this century was not written by a historian. It was written in 2013 by Jeremy Runnells, a graphic designer and lifelong member in a faith crisis, as a letter to a friend of his grandfather — a Church Educational System director who had offered to answer his questions. Runnells sent roughly 80 pages; the director never replied; Runnells posted the letter online; and the internet did the rest. A dozen years, several revisions, and three titles later — it is now styled “The CES Letter: My Search for Answers to My Mormon Doubts” — the document runs about 136 pages, covers thirteen topics, and has become the standard farewell text of Mormon disaffection: quoted in resignation letters, cited in podcasts, pressed into the hands of missionaries. Runnells himself is candid about his position — “I’m a disaffected member who lost his testimony so it’s no secret which side I’m on at the moment.”

Here is what this page believes, stated plainly: the letter’s power is structural, not evidentiary. One hundred thirty-six pages of stacked questions produce an overwhelming impression — and the impression, not any single argument, is what changes minds. The answer to a structure is a structure. What follows is the map a document that size needs: thirteen topics, each with the response in brief and a link to the full answer — on this site’s topic hubs, in the church’s own Gospel Topics essays, which address the same hard subjects in official print, and in a response literature roughly 150 citations deep, much of it written by scholars who have spent careers on documents Runnells surveys in paragraphs. Read one answer or all of them. The point of the map is that none of the territory is empty.

How to Read 136 Pages of Questions

The letter’s rhetorical engine is inundation — more claims per page than any reader can check, so the sheer mass persuades where no single argument would. The internet has a name for the asymmetry this exploits: Brandolini’s law, the observation that refuting a claim takes an order of magnitude more effort than making one. That is why every serious response to the letter is longer than the letter — Bennett’s reply alone runs several times the length of the document it answers — and why critics then cite the responses’ length as if it were a defect. It is not a defect. It is the arithmetic of accusation and evidence. Three more principles govern everything below: an accusation is not a refutation-proof fact; evidence is interpreted, and honest experts disagree; and for a believer, the evidence of spiritual experience is evidence — a premise the letter dismisses and this page does not.

The Response Shelf: Where the Full Answers Live

The letter is one document; the response literature is a shelf, and the reader deserves its map: FAIR’s claim-by-claim wiki and Sarah Allen’s multi-part rebuttal series (fairlatterdaysaints.org); Jim Bennett’s A CES Letter Reply: Faithful Answers for Those Who Doubt — the response written in the letter’s own second-person format; Brian Hales’s topic-by-topic debunking-cesletter.com; Michael Ash’s Bamboozled by the CES Letter; the Interpreter Foundation’s and Scripture Central’s technical literature — Skousen and Carmack on the text, Gee and Muhlestein on the papyri, Welch’s Opening the Heavens on the eyewitness record; and — the fact this page most wants remembered — the church’s own Gospel Topics essays, which put seer stones, multiple First Vision accounts, the papyri, polygamy, and the priesthood ban into official print in 2013–15, before most readers had heard of the letter. The claim that the church hides these topics has been obsolete for a decade; the institution publishes them at churchofjesuschrist.org, with footnotes.

If You’re the Reader the Letter Was Written For

Last section, and the most important. If you found this page mid-crisis — the letter open in another tab, the floor moving — three things, said without spin. First: your questions are legitimate, and the church itself says so; its seminary and institute curricula now teach the hard topics from the essays, and its leaders have publicly repudiated the idea that doubt is sin. Second: read at the speed of evidence, not the speed of shock. The letter is engineered to be read in one devastating sitting; the answers exist, but they are longer than the questions, because answers always are. Take the thirteen topics one at a time, strongest-feeling first, with the index above. Third: whatever you conclude, conclude it from both shelves. A faith worth keeping and a decision worth making both deserve the whole record — which is the only thing this site, on every page, has ever asked a reader to want. Start anywhere: the hubs, the essays, or the shelf.

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