Kirk writes lots of interesting things. Here he explains why he is not LDS.
I deeply love the Latter Day Saints. So the question I receive weekly is fair. If I admire them this much, why am I not one? My explanation is probably going to cost me half my followers, but so be it.
1. The Book of Mormon: Pragmatic truth versus historical truth.
I'm a William James man. A thing can be true in the sense that it remakes a life toward the good, and by that measure the Book of Mormon is one of the most powerful texts America has produced. It sobers men, steadies fathers, holds families together. The fruits are real.
But the LDS Church doesn't hand me the book solely as an archetype that works. Joseph handed it over as an artifact, a literal translation of real plates, kept by real peoples who really crossed an ocean and built real civilizations here.
Moroni's promise asks you to know it's true in that sense, and you can't hold a recommend while quietly treating it as inspired fiction. That's a claim about the past, and the past answers to evidence. I can hold Genesis as theology without a literal Eden because Rome lets me. The Restoration won't extend the same room to the Nephites. I can affirm everything the book does. I can't affirm what it says it is, and Mormonism won't let me split the two.
2. Tithing as the price of the temple.
The ordinances that matter most, the endowment, and above all the sealing that binds a man to his wife and children forever, sit behind a temple recommend.
One of the questions at that gate is whether you pay a full tithe. No tithe, no recommend. No recommend, no sealing. A father without one can't even stand in the room when his own child is married.
I've got nothing against tithing as a discipline. My problem is the tollbooth. In the old Christian grammar this sits a hair from simony, the one sin Peter named on the spot, when Simon tried to buy the gifts of God with cash.
Grace is free. I can walk into any Catholic or Orthodox parish and be married, be communed, baptize my son, with no worthiness interview standing between me and the means of grace.
3. The leadership
The wall everything else rests on.
This is the one that actually keeps me out, because the whole Restoration hangs on it. The claim isn't that the Church teaches true things. It's that fifteen living men hold the keys, and that one of them is a prophet, seer, and revelator who can speak the mind and will of God for the entire earth. Follow the prophet is the load bearing wall. Pull it and the building comes down.
So I look at the wall and my problem isn't that these men are corrupt. It's that they're weak.
It wasn't always so. There was a Church with fire in it. Ezra Taft Benson thundered against socialism from the pulpit and treated the Cold War like a holy war. Bruce R. McConkie laid down doctrine like he was carving it into granite and bore his final testimony like a man who'd seen the thing with his own eyes. Boyd K. Packer stood up and named the dangers to the Church and didn't blink. They excommunicated the September Six and dared the rest to talk back. Whatever you make of the content, that was a Church that believed it held the truth and acted like it. It was willing to be hated.
That Church is gone. What replaced it is a communications department. Focus grouped statements. "I'm a Mormon" ad campaigns selling minivan normalcy.
An institution straining to be called Christian by the same evangelicals who spent a century calling it a cult. The 2015 policy barring the children of gay couples from baptism announced by Russell Nelson as the revealed will of the Lord, then quietly killed in 2019 the moment the blowback got expensive. A five million dollar check cut to the SEC to make a concealment case go away rather than stand and fight.
And here's the raw of it: I don't want a chaplain. I don't want a beige, brand safe, please like us Church that trims its sails the second the culture frowns.
If a man stands up and tells me he speaks for God, I want him to act like it plant the flag, hold the line, take the hit, be willing to be despised for the truth and never move an inch. I want the fire of the seventies. I want prophets who fight. What I got instead are managers who apologize.
The Restoration lives or dies on whether these are oracles or executives. From where I'm standing, they govern like executives and you don't follow an executive into eternity.
None of this is an attack. It's from a place of christian love. Ultimately, you are I are brothers in Christ.
https://x.com/nicoraytruth/status/2070377593585709134?s=20
I absolutely love this; thank you for the post.
I do have a question, if I may… regarding the first one. What do you/we need to have proof that the Book of Mormon is more than inspired fiction and is an actual historical record?
For me it is clear that the physical evidences for this book have been withheld at this time, for whatever reason. But I also fear that people may be looking for the wrong things when they are looking for “proof”.
Meaning the book purports to be about Christ so I think too many people have it in their heads that we should be finding a bunch of ancient crosses all over the place.
In my mind, if evidences are found that Christ visited a people somewhere in the Americas it is not going to look any like what we might expect it to look. We are coming at this from a western/catholic/protestant perspective and I don’t think we should expect to find anything familiar to that perspective.
Disclaimer: I'm not telling you not to believe it. I want you to believe the Book of Mormon is true. Hold fast to the rod my brother.
You're right that hunting for crosses is naive. A genuine ancient American Christianity wouldn't look like Rome. it would look strange to us. Foreign. Unrecognizable.
And that's exactly where it falls apart for me. Because the Book of Mormon isn't strange at all.
I'm not troubled by what we haven't dug up. I'm troubled by what's on the page. The book is not silent. It talks, constantly, on every theme and when it talks, I don't hear an ancient people. I hear the burned over district. I hear palmyra. The anxieties in that text are not the anxieties of Bronze Age refugees in Mesoamerica; they're the anxieties of Joseph's own front porch.
A people who overthrow their kings and install a system of judges and the voice of the people that's American republicanism in a breastplate. Mass revival conversions in the exact emotional register of a camp meeting. Long stretches of Isaiah lifted in King James English.
So your own principle is the thing that convicts it. You said: don't expect it to look familiar. I agree completely. The problem is that it looks entirely familiar. It reads like exactly what a brilliant, a GENIUS, scripture soaked nineteenth century American prophet would produce if he sat down to write scripture.
It's a real prophecy aimed at us right now. A chosen land, a covenant people, pride cycles, a civilization rotting from secret combinations and destroying itself.
That's why it lands so hard on the modern American soul: not because it's about the ancients, but because it's about America. I feel America in those pages. I don't feel Native Americans.
None of this lays a finger on its beauty. A book need not be old to be true, and whatever else it is, the Book of Mormon remains one of the few things in American life that can still take a broken man and make him whole.
