Talk:Criticism of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints/Archive 2

Gender bias and sexism
What about the General authorities that are Women? Relief Society General President, Primary General President, etc. Shouldn't the fact that women actually have authority roles in the church and speak during general conference sessions be mentioned somewhere in this section? Thanks =) Superbuttons (talk) 14:04, 25 June 2013 (UTC)


 * Actually there has never been a female General Authority in the LDS Church -- all general authorities must have the priesthood, and this is not something the LDS Church allows women to directly hold. I think you are confused with the term General Officer, which is the term used for members of general presidencies of Auxiliary organizations. -- 208.81.184.4 (talk) 15:02, 25 June 2013 (UTC)


 * Hm. That's fair. I guess I was going off of a Quote by Elder Holland who said "My wife was a general authority before I was". He could have just said it casually rather than using the accurate name "General Office". With that said, women still do hold authoritative positions in the church, from the highest general offices down to the laurel presidency in the ward.  There is women leadership throughout. I think at least mention of that for neutrality's sake should be included. Thanks Superbuttons (talk) 19:28, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

From the article:
 * Indeed, church leaders have indicated that while marriage in this life is essential for men, women who do not marry in this life still have the opportunity to be sealed posthumously, creating, if anything, a double standard that benefits women.[153]

Which part of Russell M. Nelson's talk is this referring to? As far as I can tell both men and women could be posthumously sealed. 67.172.248.52 (talk) 06:48, 1 September 2013 (UTC)


 * They can. That should be removed. 216.106.18.70 (talk) 15:56, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

White and delightsome
I am curious why there is no discussion of the claims, as recent as the 50's and 60's, that people of color who joined the faith would find themselves not only washed of their sin, but that their skin itself would lighten. The most recent reference I recall was a President quotedin a Mormon publication in the 1960 that Native American children living in Mormon group homes already had lighter skin than their parents.

“The day of the Lamanites is nigh. For years they have been growing delightsome, and they are now becoming white and delightsome, as they were promised. In this picture of the twenty Lamanite missionaries, fifteen of the twenty were as light as Anglos; five were darker but equally delightsome. The children in the home placement program in Utah are often lighter than their brothers and sisters in the hogans on the reservation.... At one meeting a father and mother and their sixteen-year-old daughter were present, the little member girl-sixteen sitting between the dark father and mother, and it was evident she was several shades lighter than her parents on the same reservation, in the same Hogan, subject to the same sun and wind and weather. There was the doctor in a Utah city who for two years had had an Indian boy in his home who stated that he was some shades lighter than the younger brother just coming into the program from the reservation. These young members of the Church are changing to whiteness and delightsomeness. One white elder jokingly said that he and his companion were donating blood regularly to the hospital in the hope that the process might be accelerated.” - Prophet Spencer W. Kimball, General Conference, Oct. 1960 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 198.135.125.168 (talk) 21:03, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

God Was Once A Man
This criticism is largely invalid for a number of reasons. Most of all, because the sources quoted do not say what the authors of this section claim they say. Also, the criticism is of the manner in which the doctrine is presented, rather than of the doctrine itself, which is not encyclopedic. — Preceding unsigned comment added by CadoganEligos (talk • contribs) 17:22, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
 * The sources quoted say exactly what they are citing and yes I have read them all. This section has only two sentences.
 * 1. "Critics such as Richard Abanes and the Institute for Religious Research criticize the church for changing the principle asserting that God was once a man, citing changes to the LDS publication Gospel Principles between the 1978 and 1997 editions, where "We can become Gods like our Heavenly Father" was changed to "We can become like our Heavenly Father", and "our Heavenly Father became a God" was changed to "our Heavenly Father became God""
 * The cited sources and  clearly back up the fact that Richard Abanes and the Institute for Religious Research have criticize the church for the changes made between the 1978 and 1997 LDS publications of Gospel Principles.  It is not saying that they are correct, only that they have "criticize the church" for making changes.
 * 2. "However, official LDS publications have still affirmed the doctrine of eternal progression, and the official church manual Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Lorenzo Snow, published in 2012, affirms the LDS doctrine that "As man is, God once was; as God now is, man may be.""
 * Again the cited sources clearly state that the LDS church affirmed the doctrine of eternal progression and that they believe that "As man is, God once was; as God now is, man may be."
 * Clearly this two sentences are properly cited with WP:RS. Yes, the sentences make it clear that they are criticizing the fact that they have "changing" things.  However, it is irrelevant if the people are criticizing the doctrine itself or if they are criticizing the way the doctrine is "presenting", it is still a "Criticism" of the LDS Church.  That is all and this being a "Criticism" page it is completely appropriate.--- ARTEST4ECHO (talk) 17:38, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

Negative View of LDS Church in Arthur Conan Doyle's Fiction
I sought and browsed this and its parent article after reading Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes short A Study In Scarlet, written in the late 19th century, roughly contemporary with the abolition of polygamy in the main body of the movement (Doyle doubtless motivated by this and other religious differences), featuring a Danite group led by Brigham Young. Doyle depicts the Mormon community of his story as the site of paranoia and spying, and has his female lead flee and ultimately perish within arranged polygamous marriage (the cause of the revenge killing behind the London crime case); Doyle may also have had allegorical intentions in naming her Lucy Ferrier (akin to the famous fallen angel), more stark for its context in a Christian sect. Since South Park, a pop culture ref, is mentioned, the much earlier Holmes story seems worthy; the subject is mentioned in the Wiki entry on the debut of the fictional detective. ~ Ex-Wikipedian — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.133.161.126 (talk) 00:55, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

Missing historic criticisms of sugar company holdings
After the the 1904 Reed Smoot hearings, the very next chapter in criticisms of the LDS Church came from the Hardwick Committee investigations in the 1910-1920s. See: Utah-Idaho Sugar Company. There is no mention of this in the article. -- 155.95.90.245 (talk) 19:59, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

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Why?
Why is there a page dedicated to the criticism of this religion in particular? All religions have critics. People will cast doubts over the authenticity of the scriptures of all religions. It should suffice to have an article about the religion and leave readers to draw their own conclusions. There is something not right about having a special page to bash a particular religion. Criticism of a specific religion is not something that a reader would normally go to an encyclopaedia to look up. 86.145.97.172 (talk) 23:40, 19 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Actually, there are pages criticizing a few other religions, such as Catholicism, Islam, Buddhism, Jehovah's Witnesses, and religion in general. There are not criticism pages for Hinduism, Protestantism, Amish, etc. To a certain extent, however, I agree with you. Having a whole page criticizing the LDS church or any other religion is something that I wish wasn't on Wikipedia, but there is nothing we can do about it. So we have to do our best to ensure that pages such as this one are balance, fair, and accurate.Jordan Latimer (talk) 06:48, 20 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Comment. The purpose of the page is not to criticize the LDS Church. It is to describe the cultural fact that the church has been criticized by others. Wikipedia is not censored, and there are many WP pages that describe criticism of organizations, people, ideologies, etc. Good Ol’factory (talk) 08:30, 20 February 2015 (UTC)
 * I agree with Good Ol'factory, but I also agree that this article does not currently live up to this ideal. For a long time, I have imagined an article that went through the history of notable criticism of the LDS Church, including both external (Thomas C. Sharp, Tanners) and internal (September Six, Kate Kelly, John Dehlin). It would focus on the causes and effects of the criticism, including how the church reacted. It would also discuss the church's policies and statements about what criticism it deems acceptable before it excommunicates people for apostasy. The focus would be on the criticism itself and its causes and effects, rather than on the content of the criticism, which can appear more fully in any of the topical articles. To make this possible, and to prevent it from becoming simply a jumbled repository of examples of criticism, I'd rather see the article be organized on a chronological basis, rather than a topical basis. CO GDEN  19:27, 20 February 2015 (UTC)


 * The criticism is one of the most noteworthy things about the cult. It would be like having a page about Ted Bundy and not once mentioning that he was a serial killer. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 137.54.125.244 (talk) 17:13, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

That's hilarious "I have not even bothered to look at any other pages but am going to assume there is absolutely no criticism of any other religion except mine" — Preceding unsigned comment added by 159.117.1.11 (talk) 21:43, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

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Original Research
The section on the Book of Mormon had a lot of footnotes citing general works on history and science that don't appear to address the Book of Mormon at all: These citations fail to establish that anyone has ever noted these anachronisms before, and directly argue against the historicity of the Book of Mormon with the editorial voice of Wikipedia, violating NPOV. As discussed above, this should not be a "page criticizing the LDS church" but a description of the "fact that the church has been criticized by others." I have removed these from the article in hopes of getting it closer to the latter. Lusanaherandraton (talk) 23:30, 18 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Handbook of North American Indians, pp. 208–18 (Donald K. Grayson, "Late Plestocene Faunal Extinctions") lists horses, elephants and related mammals as extinct
 * GC.ca
 * AACCnet.org
 * While iron ores such as haematite were mined (rather rarely), they were used as coloring. The metal was not extracted. See: . Also: Journal of the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society, December 2007.
 * AACCnet.org
 * While iron ores such as haematite were mined (rather rarely), they were used as coloring. The metal was not extracted. See: . Also: Journal of the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society, December 2007.
 * While iron ores such as haematite were mined (rather rarely), they were used as coloring. The metal was not extracted. See: . Also: Journal of the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society, December 2007.

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Removal of Sections
I wonder if we ought to remove the sections "FARMS scholarship questioned" and "Historical authenticity of the Book of Mormon", not because they aren't hot issues, but because they aren't criticisms of the LDS church in and of itself. We could instead just put the links Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies and Historical authenticity of the Book of Mormon in the "see also" section.Gypsy Danger Dynamite (talk) 02:06, 19 January 2017 (UTC)

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Neglected Criticisms: 1) Requirement of Unquestioning Obedience 2) Claiming to be Christian while deviating from the pattern of historical Christianity
I have lived in Mormonism's home turf--Utah, Southeast Idaho, Calif, & Arizona, for 60 years, where the general population is semi-well-informed about the LDSaints. If I talk to virtually any (nonMormon) believing Christian, the most common critique of LDS by a mile is that they give lip service to being Christians without conforming to standards and beliefs of historical Christianity. If I talk to nonChristians, very high on the list of their reasons they wouldn't want to be Mormon is that Mormon leaders are profoundly authoritarian, even exceeding Catholicism in this. During the lives of J Smith and B Young, the main voice of condemnation from the surrounding US culture was "they don't follow the Bible and invented a new version of Christianity that isn't Christian." Anyone interested in adding info on these items? I have added the "nonChristian Christians" complaint to the first paragraph.Moabalan (talk) 15:21, 4 February 2018 (UTC)Moabalan (talk) 15:14, 4 February 2018 (UTC)

Broken citation links in the article
There are broken citation links for the following sources listed in the footnotes: Tanner 1979, Tanner 1987, Eskridge 2002, Compton 1997. 24.251.134.151 (talk) 23:22, 13 August 2018 (UTC)

Extreme POV Issues
This article may be marked as a POV fork due to the fact that it attempts to get around the policy by making a new article away for the main Latter Day Saint Article. Also, extremely argumentative and contentious words/statements are used with the article having a section dedicated to a belief not even accepted by the LDS church that was even repudiated. PeanutHat (talk) 10:12, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

"The Tanners and the Ostlings accuse the church of being overly greedy and materialistic, citing the large amount of wealth accumulated by the church, and citing the strong emphasis on tithing,[92] and suggest that the church is more like a business than a spiritual endeavor" this clearly states opinion as fact. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:WIKIVOICE&redirect=no for the policy. PeanutHat (talk) 11:02, 11 April 2020 (UTC)


 * , it's clearly opinion. If would be stated as fact if it said "The church is overly greedy..the evidence being the large amount...". That's the way we work. In any case if you template an article you shouldn't template anything else as pov, just bring it up as you have. Doug Weller  talk 13:19, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

Alright thanks for clearing that up PeanutHat (talk) 13:29, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

Are the repudiated beliefs still mentioned npov? PeanutHat (talk) 06:05, 17 May 2020 (UTC)
 * No change necessary. Please review what WP:POVFORK actually says: There is currently no consensus whether a "Criticism of..." article is always a POV fork, but many criticism articles nevertheless suffer from POV problems. The one specific possible POV problem mentioned is not, in fact, POV since it clearly identifies the source of the opinion. An organization as large as the LDS Church will inevitably attract criticism and leaving it in the main article overwhelms the original and exceeds recommended size constraints.  This is not a unique situation with respect to LDS. See, for example, Criticism of the Catholic Church, Criticism of the Baháʼí Faith, Criticism of Islamism, etc. Specific concerns can be addressed through specific talk page topics or the  normal editing cycle but attempting to use tag-bombing to dismiss or deprecate an article is rarely helpful. Eggishorn (talk) (contrib) 15:54, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

Polygamy Seems Pretty Clear To Me.
Polygamy is perhaps the most controversial, and was a key contributing factor for Smith's murder. says the article. There's a noun missing here. Polygamy is the most controversial what? Nobody doubts that polygamy is the act or custom of men having more than one wife at the same time, and I don't think there are any doubts anywhere about its legality. There's no controversy there. There have been times when there was conflict in the course of society suppressing polygamy, but I don't see that there was any controversy involved. Everybody on both sides of these fights understood polygamy perfectly well and in agreement all around. Could the writers responsible perhaps try to write something grammatically and factually accurate around the practice?

David Lloyd-Jones (talk) 20:49, 30 June 2020 (UTC)


 * It probably means the most controversial thing that has been the subject of criticism of the LDS Church. You're right that it needs to be reworded, or simply removed. Good Ol’factory (talk) 01:28, 1 July 2020 (UTC)

Major overhaul to article structure and lead
I'd like to do a major overhaul to the structure of this document by dividing the criticism up into major eras of church history. My suggestion would be to create the following major sections, divide the existing content into them, and create new content as needed. I believe a structure like this will aid in fixing the problem with the lead and create a cohesive flow for the entire article. Input from editors to refine these major categories before they are implemented would be greatly appreciated. JHelzer💬 16:18, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Critics [leave as is]
 * Joseph Smith and the early church (1820 - 1844)
 * Brigham Young and the pioneer church (1844 - 1951)
 * Recent leaders and the world wide church (1951 - present)
 * Mormon apologetics organizations
 * New sections created and content moved in a series of edits today. No original content was added or removed. Sections were only reorganized.  New text was added to the lead, but was not new content.  It came from a portion of the criticism section on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  That set of paragraphs was well written and makes an excellent lead for this article.  The main sections are now representative of the lead so the  template was removed.  I will let these changes rest for a week before making any further updates. Please join me in improving the flow of the article. JHelzer💬 04:42, 23 February 2021 (UTC)