The Restoration

Words to Know

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — the church organized by Joseph Smith in New York on 6 April 1830. It reports more than seventeen million members around the world.¹

The Restoration — the teaching that after the apostles died, the church I founded fell away from the truth and lost the authority of the priesthood, in what Latter-day Saints call the Great Apostasy, and that God restored it through Joseph Smith, beginning with a vision in 1820.

The Book of Mormon — a book that Joseph Smith said he translated from ancient gold plates, published in 1830, which Latter-day Saints accept as scripture alongside the Bible, the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price.

Temple recommend — the card a member must hold to enter a temple. It is given after interviews with church leaders, and one of the questions is whether the member pays a full tithe, a tenth of their income.²

Start with the name.

In 2018 the president of your church asked the world to stop calling you Mormons, and to use the church’s full name, with my name in it. He told your general conference that to remove the Lord’s name from the Lord’s church was a major victory for Satan.³

You put my name on the building. So it is fair to ask what I taught.

Your church begins with a claim about loss. It teaches that the church I founded fell away after the apostles died, and that something precious had to be restored. So let me ask a plain question. What had been lost?

Look at what your church says it restored. A priesthood, with two orders and many offices. Keys of authority, passed from one president to the next. Temples, with ordinances that only the worthy may enter to perform. A living prophet. And a second book of scripture.

Now look at the things I said most often: blessed are the poor, love your enemies, forgive debts, take in the stranger, let the greatest be the servant. None of those was ever lost. They have been in every Bible for nineteen hundred years. They did not need restoring. They needed doing.

I am not going to tell you that the people in your ward are bad people. Many of them are the most generous and hardworking people you will ever meet. They will bring you dinner when you are sick and help you move on a Saturday without being asked twice. Your church has things in it that are very close to me, and some of them are in your own scriptures. I will come back to them. The question is whether the four things your church leans on most, the prophet, the priesthood, the temple and the treasury, are the ones I set down. Let me take them one at a time.

The First Pillar: The Prophet

You were taught to follow the prophet. I told my followers that they had one teacher.

Your church teaches that its president is a prophet who speaks for God, and that he holds the keys to lead the whole church. In 1890 one of your presidents said that the Lord would never permit the man who stands as president of the church to lead it astray.⁴ That sentence is printed in your scriptures.

I said something different to my own followers: don’t you be called ‘Rabbi,’ for one is your teacher, the Christ, and all of you are brothers … Neither be called masters, for one is your master, the Christ (Matthew 23:8, 10).

And I gave you a test for every prophet who would ever come: By their fruits you will know them (Matthew 7:16). Not by their office. Not by their keys. By what grows where they have been.

The Second Pillar: The Priesthood

You were taught that the priesthood is the power to act in God’s name. I said the greatest would be the servant of all.

For most of its history your church kept Black men out of its priesthood, and Black men and women out of the temple ordinances of the endowment and the sealing. In the earliest years a few Black men were ordained. Then, in 1852, Brigham Young announced that Black men could no longer be ordained. After he died, later presidents also closed the endowment and temple marriage to Black men and women. The priesthood ban stayed in place for a hundred and twenty-six years, until June 1978.⁵ For generations your leaders taught that black skin was a sign of a curse, or of something done wrong before birth.

Your church has since said, in an essay on its own website, that it disavows those theories, and that it does not know exactly how the ban began.⁶ I am glad it said so. But notice what that means. For a hundred and twenty-six years, a line ran through my church that I never drew, and the prophets you were taught to follow taught it.

The line I drew ran the other way. I asked a Samaritan woman for a drink when Jews have no dealings with Samaritans (John 4:9). I made a Samaritan the hero of my most famous story (Luke 10:33). I called the Temple a house of prayer for all the nations (Mark 11:17).

And I never gave my followers a ladder of ranks to climb. I told the men around me who wanted to rank above the others: whoever wants to become great among you shall be your servant. Whoever of you wants to become first among you, shall be bondservant of all (Mark 10:43–44).

The Third Pillar: The Temple

You were taught that the temple is the house of the Lord, open to the worthy. When I died, the veil of the Temple was torn in two.

To enter one of your temples, a member must be judged worthy, and one of the things checked is whether they pay a full tenth of their income. Until 2019, a couple who married in a civil wedding, so that their non-member parents could watch, had to wait a year before they could be sealed in the temple. Parents who are not members, or not judged worthy, cannot come into the sealing room. They wait in the temple’s waiting room, if it has one, or on the grounds, while their children are married inside.⁷

I went into the Temple in Jerusalem and overthrew the money changers’ tables (Mark 11:15). I told the experts in tithing that they had kept the small things and left undone the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faith. I did not tell them to stop tithing. I said you ought to have done these, and not to have left the other undone (Matthew 23:23). The tithe was never the problem. The question is which one is checked at the door. And at the moment I died, Mark says, the veil of the temple was torn in two from the top to the bottom (Mark 15:38). The curtain that kept people out of the holiest place was open.

Your temples are built around families sealed together for eternity. I loved my mother. But when I was told she and my brothers were outside asking for me, I looked at the people sitting around me and said: whoever does the will of God is my brother, my sister, and mother (Mark 3:35). And when I was asked whose wife a woman would be in the next life, I said: in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are like God’s angels in heaven (Matthew 22:30).

The Fourth Pillar: The Treasury

You were taught that the church is the Lord’s storehouse. I told you not to lay up treasures on earth.

Your church collects a tenth of the income of millions of faithful members, many of whom are not rich. In 2019 a former employee of its investment fund, Ensign Peak Advisors, told the government that the fund held about a hundred billion dollars.⁸ In 2023 the federal Securities and Exchange Commission fined your church and the fund five million dollars for hiding the size of its stock holdings for more than twenty years, behind thirteen shell companies, with the approval of church leaders. The church settled without admitting or denying the findings, and said it had relied on legal advice.⁹

I said: Don’t lay up treasures for yourselves on the earth, where moth and rust consume, and where thieves break through and steal … for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also (Matthew 6:19, 21). I told a story about a rich man who built bigger barns, and God called him a fool (Luke 12:16–21).

And I watched the treasury in Jerusalem once. Rich people put in large gifts. A poor widow put in two small coins. I said she put in more than all of them, for all these put in gifts for God from their abundance, but she, out of her poverty, put in all that she had to live on (Luke 21:3–4). The widow’s gift went into a treasury that did not need it. I noticed.

What Your Church Kept

Now, in fairness, look at what your church kept. Some of it is in your own scriptures, and it is very close to me.

In the Book of Mormon, when the risen Lord comes to the people of the Americas, after he shows them his wounds and teaches them about baptism, he preaches my Sermon on the Mount to them again, in much the same words, with some changes (3 Nephi 12–14). Of all the things your book could have put in my mouth, it chose the sermon about the poor in spirit, the merciful, the peacemakers and loving your enemies.

And it tells you what happened to the people who lived by it: And they had all things common among them; therefore there were not rich and poor, bond and free, but they were all made free, and partakers of the heavenly gift (4 Nephi 1:3). Your Pearl of Great Price describes Zion the same way: there was no poor among them (Moses 7:18). That is exactly what Acts says about the first church in Jerusalem (Acts 4:34).

Your book has one of the best sermons on the poor ever written. A king named Benjamin tells his people that they must not refuse a beggar by saying the man brought his misery on himself, and then asks them: For behold, are we not all beggars? (Mosiah 4:16–19).

Your church tried to live it. In 1831 Joseph Smith received a revelation that members should consecrate their property to the church for the support of the poor, and in 1874 Brigham Young introduced the United Order. More than two hundred communities organized one. Most were shared businesses. In a few places, such as Orderville, people held all their property in common.¹⁰ Most were gone within a few years. Your church still teaches the law of consecration as a temple covenant, and members live it now through tithes, offerings and service. But it was tried, and it was close to me.

And you kept a great deal of it in practice. Once a month your members go without two meals and give what the food would have cost to the poor.¹¹ Your bishops run storehouses, your welfare system has fed families through hard times, and your volunteers are among the first to arrive after a flood or a hurricane. Your church spends more than a billion dollars a year on welfare and humanitarian aid.¹²

So the question is not whether I am in your church. I am in the casserole at the door and the truck after the hurricane, and in King Benjamin’s question. The question is which part stands on top. On top are the keys, the recommend, and the fund.

What You’ll Hear Back

If you show this to someone you love, they will have answers ready. Here are the six you will hear most, and what is underneath each one.

“We are Christians too.”

I am not going to argue about who gets to use the word. I never asked anyone to. I asked: Why do you call me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and don’t do the things which I say? (Luke 6:46). That is the only test of the word I ever gave, and it applies to every church that uses my name.

“Pray about it, and the Spirit will tell you it is true.”

They mean the promise at the end of the Book of Mormon, that whoever asks God with a sincere heart will be shown the truth of it by the Holy Ghost (Moroni 10:4). People in many churches and religions pray sincerely and are sure they were answered, and they are told opposite things.

I gave you a test that does not depend on a feeling: By their fruits you will know them (Matthew 7:16). Look at what a church does with its power and its money. That is the fruit.

“The church is true. Its members aren’t perfect.”

The priesthood ban was not a member’s mistake. Neither were the shell companies. Those were decisions made by the leaders, at the top, over decades. A church that is called true has to be measured by what its leaders did, not only by what its members failed to do.

“Families can be together forever.”

I hope with you that nothing good is ever lost. But I never made a family’s eternity depend on a temple ordinance, or a temple door that parents without a recommend cannot go through. When I was asked about marriage in the next life, I said they are like God’s angels in heaven (Matthew 22:30). And I said who my family was: whoever does the will of God (Mark 3:35). That family has no recommend at the door.

“The prophet will never lead the church astray.”

Your church now disavows what its prophets taught for over a century about black skin. So you already know that they can be wrong, because your church has told you so.

I did not leave you a man who could not be wrong. I left you my words and a test. One is your teacher (Matthew 23:8).

“Our church gives more humanitarian aid than almost anyone.”

It gives a great deal, and I am glad of every meal of it. But I measured giving by what was left over, not by what was given. The rich at the treasury gave large gifts from their abundance. The widow gave all that she had to live on (Luke 21:4). A billion dollars a year, from a church whose fund held about thirty-eight billion dollars in stocks alone in 2019, and which a former employee said held a hundred billion in all, is a gift from abundance.

And I said this about how to give: don’t sound a trumpet before yourself (Matthew 6:2).

If You Were Raised in It

You may remember Primary songs and family home evening, the white shirt and the tie, the mission call opened in front of the whole family, two years far from home, the ward that showed up for every move and every funeral, and the first time you walked into the temple. You may also remember interviews about your worthiness, and the feeling that you were always being measured. Some of you served faithfully and still do. Some of you left, and lost friends and family over it.

Nothing here asks you to be ashamed of where you came from, or of the good you did there.

It only asks you to do what I asked of the lawyer: How do you read it? (Luke 10:26). Read the Sermon on the Mount. Then read it again in 3 Nephi, where your own book puts it, and read 4 Nephi 1:3 and Mosiah 4. Then ask whether the church that holds those pages is living them. If what you find does not match what you were told, you are allowed to notice. The restoration I wanted was never of an office. It was of a people with no poor among them.

Check It Yourself

Read Matthew 5–7. Then read 3 Nephi 12–14 and compare them.

Read 4 Nephi 1:1–3 and Moses 7:18. Then read Acts 4:32–35.

Read Mosiah 4:16–26, King Benjamin on the beggar.

Read Matthew 23:1–12 and Mark 10:42–45. Write down what I said about titles and rank.

Read Mark 11:15–17, Mark 15:38 and Matthew 23:23.

Read Luke 21:1–4. Write down how I measured a gift.

Read your church’s own essay “Race and the Priesthood” on its website. Write down what it disavows.

Look up the SEC’s order of 21 February 2023 against Ensign Peak Advisors (it is public). Write down how long the holdings were hidden.

The Short Version

• Your church put my name on the building, and teaches that my church was lost and had to be restored.
• What it says it restored includes offices, keys, temples and a prophet, and a second book of scripture. What I taught most, the poor, enemies, forgiveness, the stranger, the servant, was never lost. It needed doing.
• I said one is your teacher, and I gave a test for every prophet: their fruits.
• Black men were kept out of the priesthood from 1852 to 1978, and Black men and women were kept out of the temple endowment and sealing until 1978. Your church now disavows the reasons its leaders gave.
• A temple recommend requires a full tithe. I told tithers to keep the tithe and not leave undone justice, mercy and faith, and the Temple’s veil was torn when I died.
• In 2023 the SEC fined your church for hiding a portfolio worth tens of billions behind shell companies. I said not to lay up treasures on earth.
• Your own scriptures say it best: no rich and poor (4 Nephi), no poor among them (Moses 7), are we not all beggars? (Mosiah 4).
• You kept the monthly fast for the poor, the storehouses, and the volunteers who turn up after disasters.
• I measured a gift by what was left over, like the widow’s two coins.