Faith Crisis - We Were NOT Betrayed!: Answering, "Did the LDS Church Lie?"

by L. Hannah Stoddard, James F. Stoddard III

After working with thousands of struggling members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints over many years, the authors decided to write a book offering hope and answers for those struggling with faith crisis. Unbeknownst to the general Church membership, the 20th century would witness an organized effort to rewrite Latter-day Saint history from within its own ranks. In a head-to-head, behind-the-scenes-battle, traditional leaders resisted intellectual progressives working in the Church History Department and at BYU, who claimed some forty years ago that it would take a generation to re-educate the Church membership. Where are we in this attempted re-education? What is the New Mormon History, and how does it personally affect you and your family? Join us as we explore newly-available diaries, review old books, and bring untold history into the light! Answered in the Progressives claim the Church covered up its history for nearly 200 years. Is the current faith crisis stemming from unmasked history . . . or new interpretations? Why did New Mormon Historians insist Hofmann s forgeries were legitimate, even when investigators provided convincing evidence to them of the hoax? How did Bruce R. McConkie know Hofmann s Joseph Smith III blessing was a fake, despite authentication by document experts and pressure by historians calling him incompetent for questioning? Who were the Swearing Elders ? How did this group of progressive Latter-day Saints reshape the identity of Mormonism? Why did Carol Lynn Pearson and Leonard Arrington share cards that read, History is on our side as long as we can control the historians? Leonard Arrington shared that an invisible higher power commissioned him to rewrite or reconstruct our dominant narrative of the Restoration. Did God want our history changed? Why did Leonard Arrington say the First Vision, Nephites and gold plates were part of the Mormon myth ? Why did Leonard Arrington note that if he were honest about his beliefs, not many Latter-day Saints would want [him] to teach their children ? How did this affect his career as Church Historian and later at BYU? Progressives, working in the Church History Department and at BYU, claimed 40 years ago it would take a generation to re-educate the Church. Where are we in this re-education?

Genres: Religion

264 pages, Paperback

Published July 1, 2020

Reviews

[Mary Wilder · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading “Faith Crisis Volume 1: We Were Not Betrayed” by
James and Hannah Stoddard.
James and Hannah have done an excellent job in explaining why so many people are struggling with their testimonies. I wasn’t aware, until now, of what has been going on.
It’s sad that our children have been fed lies about the history of the church by progressive historians. This false narrative has even crept into our Church Educational System.
It’s strange to think that someone in the Church would think of The Book of Mormon as fiction. It’s also strange that there are progressives who are trying to change the history of The Church to fit their own narrative.
What these progressives have become are “the learned who think they are wise.”
I’m glad that James and Hannah have helped explain what’s been going on.
I highly recommend reading “Faith Crisis Volume 1.”

[Brad Hart · Rating 1 out of 5]

Every so often, a book comes along claiming to resolve every question and doubt tied to an LDS faith crisis. Sometimes, they actually help. Patrick Mason’s Planted and Terryl and Fiona Givens’ The God Who Weeps are standout examples — intellectually serious, spiritually generous, and rooted in both compassion and credible scholarship.

Then there are books like No Need for a Faith Crisis: We Were Not Betrayed by Hannah and James Stoddard — works so historically inept, so smugly ignorant, and so fundamentally detached from reality that they do more damage to sincere faith than any anti-Mormon tract ever could. This book doesn’t seek to understand or uplift; it seeks to shame, censor, and condemn.

From the start, the title should have been a red flag. So should the fact that no reputable LDS publisher, including Deseret Book, would touch it. But I read it anyway — on the recommendation of a well-meaning friend — and I deeply regret that decision.

Rather than engage with historical facts or genuine questions, the Stoddards unleash a firehose of ideological rigidity wrapped in false certainty. Their knowledge of LDS history is paper-thin and heavily filtered through an ultra-fundamentalist lens that sees complexity as heresy and intellectual nuance as betrayal. Instead of addressing the actual content of historians’ work — like that of Richard Bushman or Leonard Arrington — they lob juvenile insults and launch character assassinations.

The Stoddards’ grasp of history is not just shallow — it’s willfully dishonest. They reject the Church’s own historical admissions, such as Joseph Smith’s use of a seer stone in the translation of the Book of Mormon — something explicitly acknowledged on the Church’s website. According to them, such details are Satanic lies, even though they’ve been vetted and published by official Church sources. In short, their view of Church history is so blinkered and rigid that not even the Church itself is conservative enough for them.

The book’s treatment of evolutionary science is laughable — if it weren’t so embarrassing. That the authors attack Henry Eyring, one of Mormonism’s most respected scientists, for accepting evolution shows just how ignorant and anti-intellectual this project really is. The Stoddards aren’t interested in understanding faith crises; they’re interested in purging anyone who doesn’t conform to their 1950s fantasy version of Mormonism.

Their section on the Mark Hofmann forgeries is a perfect example of historical malpractice. Instead of exploring the complexity of the Church’s response or acknowledging that everyone — from scholars to prophets — was deceived, they use the episode as a cudgel to ridicule and blame historians. Apparently, no mistake is forgivable unless you’re the Stoddards themselves.

And let’s talk about their arrogance. In their introduction, they suggest that their book, like the Book of Mormon, doesn’t need peer review. That’s right — they compare their self-published, ideologically driven screed to a foundational scriptural text. Meanwhile, they mock professional historians for their credentials, unless of course those historians agree with them — in which case lack of training becomes a virtue.

They don’t build arguments; they compile out-of-context quotes and assume their audience is too uncritical to question them. It’s an echo chamber disguised as a thesis. They offer no new insights, no real research, and no humility. Just smug assertions backed by little more than willful distortion and partisan dogma.

Even their own foreword writer, Chauncey Riddle, seems skeptical. He concedes the book should be taken “with a grain of salt.” If your own endorser is hedging in the introduction, what does that say about the quality of your scholarship?

Ultimately, No Need for a Faith Crisis isn’t about truth, faith, or history. It’s about enforcing a narrow ideological purity test and pretending it’s revelation. For those who want their biases confirmed and their questions silenced, this book is a gift. For anyone else — for anyone who values honest inquiry, faithful complexity, or historical integrity — this book is a disaster.

This isn’t apologetics. It’s anti-intellectualism in its purest, most embarrassing form.

[Christopher Angulo · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel like the readers of the Great Basin Kingdom after reading this book. Do the authors believe in the living prophets? It appears from their various statements that the answer is yes. Yet despite this, the book is almost void from anything the present and recent church leaders have said done about the "new" history. For example, where is a discussion of the Gospel Topic essays which are APPROVED by the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve? If the answer to the absence of this discussion is that the prophets are fallen, then this book makes sense, and falls in line with the narrative that progressives are wrong and traditionalists are right. But I don't think that was the intention of the book. In the end, the book is crafted as the truth, but in reality it is poor history (of which there are good citations) with poor and watered down analysis (no cites for direct quotes, poor comparisons, etc.). I've read a couple of books from this foundation, and they all just feel like Tim Ballard's Lincoln Hypothesis, all show, little substance.

The church needs a voice to stand up for traditions, but one would hope for a voice that lifts and edifies, not separates and vilifies.

[Nathan · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book suffers at every level from myriad weaknesses and flaws, and ultimately fails to accomplish the stated goals of the authors.

At the most basic level, poor writing plagues the book. Concepts and characters are repeatedly introduced after they’ve already been mentioned (e.g., the CES Letter on 57, Sterling McMurrin on 146, Ronald Walker’s book on 187), and certain quotations are repeated at several points and then restated in the authors’ own words (e.g., from Margaret Young and Ezra Taft Benson) in such a way that it seems like the authors have found so little evidence for their argument that they have to reuse data points. To hazard a guess, I suspect that a good chunk of the material was recycled content, originally created for a different purpose (e.g., blog posts or presentations) and was then pasted into the book as chapters with little editing.

Beyond the poor writing, the book is riddled with factual errors and strange editing choices. For example, the front matter of the book is interspersed with ads for other products from the Joseph Smith Foundation, the publisher. The back of table of contents is an ad, as is the back of the dedication and editing team page, and these have been preceded by no less than six full-page ads! Strange editing like the boxed text on page 15 appears only to never be repeated. Basic factual errors include the misstatement of Community of Christ’s name (23, 44), the miscapitalization of the name of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (26, 76), and the misstatement of the name of Brigham Young University (90). None of these problems are crucial by themselves, nor even collectively, but they illustrate a cavalier approach to accuracy that extends to more important areas.

For example, citations. One of my most common notes while reading the book was “citation needed” because of the frequency with which claims are made without citation. As far as I can tell, page 11 is the reader’s introduction to one of the worst citation offenses an author can make: the word “some.” “Or maybe, as some thought,” the offending sentence begins, and then there is no citation giving an example of anyone thinking what the authors claim! Weasel words like “some” aren’t acceptable on Wikipedia without citation; they certainly shouldn’t be in a published book, even if it is self-published. This abuse of “some” and related words like “many” recurs regularly for the rest of the book (e.g., 44, 52, 198, 222).

Additionally, the book is shot through with claims that ought to be cited but are not (e.g., 32-33, 44, 45, 89, 128, 132, 134, 157, 165, 187, 189, 196, 202, 203, 214, 218, 221) and even occasionally quoted language that seems like it ought to be cited but is not (220). Finally, there are citations that offer incomplete, seemingly irrelevant information (189), and citations that do not support the claim being made (53, 189), both of which feel especially weird precisely because there are so many instances where no citation was given but one should have been. How was there time to provide citations that seemingly serve no purpose or provide only unnecessary information when there are so many claims missing citations altogether? Again, none of these problems are fatal individually (though missing citations are far more important than typos and infelicitous writing), but collectively they pose a problem, even for a self-published book. (Not that self-publishing is necessarily of lower quality; I just tend to hold self-published books to a slightly lower standard of professionalism knowing how many more resources professional publishers can bring to the table.)

And while the problems with citations are considerably more worrisome than formatting and grammar errors, they pale in comparison to the cavalier approach to accuracy mentioned above that the authors extend to summarizing views they disagree with. And this despite the authors’ stated intent to “present our understanding of the progressive viewpoint, based on [progressives’] own words and actions.” (15). Additionally, they state that “we do not intend to disparage or misrepresent progressive historians.” (15). And yet, misrepresentation occurs throughout the book (see 53 and 163 for two representative examples) of both self-identified and author-identified progressives, and these misrepresentations are almost always reductive of the progressive argument in such a way that better allows the authors to discredit it. (Note: I think “progressive” as a characterization is itself also a reductive way of describing those with whom the authors disagree, but I follow their word choice for convenience’s sake.) These misrepresentations and attendant footnotes often give the impression that the authors are not engaging with the actual work of the scholar in question or attempting to present it without distortion, but rather have their understanding mediated through critical responses to it and are repeating ideological criticisms they have collected from like-minded critics.

Furthermore, at other points the progressive side is simply described by the authors without reference to progressive writings (128, 202, 217, 218, 222), despite their stated intent to do otherwise. (15). For example, the authors describe the documentary hypothesis as arguing that the Pentateuch is “an assortment of ancient texts from authors who may have exaggerated their narratives to instill confidence in, and give identity to, the young nation of Israel.” (128). Why is this description summarized instead of taken from a progressive scholar’s writings or an introductory textbook on biblical criticism? I’ll grant that this is a broad topic, so perhaps several scholars or textbooks could have been quoted, or one and then a footnote with concurring descriptions. Except wait, there is no footnote here, even for the authors’ summary! It turns out that the summary is not even based on a progressive scholar’s work, much less actually “their own words” as the authors maintain they will do. (15). This lack of reference is then further compounded as the authors attempt to show how the documentary hypothesis “calls into question the authenticity of the Book of Mormon[,] which unequivocally identifies the five books of Moses which were available to the Nephites from the Brass Plates [sic].” (128). As the authors argue, “if Moses was not the author of those works [i.e., the Pentateuch], then statements made by Nephi . . . in the Book of Mormon [referencing the Pentateuch as the five books of Moses] must be invalid.” (128). But it’s simply not the case that these points are mutually exclusive. At the most basic level, “the five books of Moses” could mean that they tell Moses’ story; there’s no requirement Moses have authored the books (much as the names of other books in the Latter-day Saint canon do not necessarily convey authorship). Alternatively, it could have been an erroneous tradition in Nephi’s day that Moses wrote the Pentateuch which Nephi believed, leading him to identify them as the five books of Moses in his account. I had never been exposed to this argument of mutual exclusivity against the documentary hypothesis before reading the book, and I came up with these two possibilities in five minutes of thinking. Almost certainly there are Latter-day Saint scholars who have written more extensively on the reconciliation of Restoration scripture with the documentary hypothesis and who have given it considerably more than five minutes’ thought. Why aren’t they even cited, much less quoted? Treatments like this, of which the documentary hypothesis and the Book of Mormon example is but one, suggest an inability on the part of the authors to take their interlocutors’ arguments seriously. It reminds me of people I met while serving a mission who told me that since Joseph Smith’s name didn’t appear in the Bible he could possibly have been a prophet, as if I were somehow unaware of this basic fact or unable to account for it. Similarly, Latter-day Saint scholars who study the documentary hypothesis are not unaware of the most basic potential conflicts between it and their beliefs.

Which leads me to what I think is the biggest problem with the book: its promotion of a fundamentalist treatment of scripture. Despite disavowing prophetic infallibility, the authors insist on an inerrant view of scripture based on Joseph Smith’s statement that “there is no error in the revelations which I have taught.” (They even extend the definition of “the revelations” to encompass “other teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith found . . . elsewhere [i.e., not in the canon]” (23), making the teachings of Joseph Smith functionally infallible.) But it is a choice to read “no error” as requiring that every teaching or writing of Joseph Smith’s be perfectly accurate in all possible ways, not the necessary conclusion. They do the same with Joseph Smith’s statement that the Book of Mormon “was the most correct of any book on earth,” insisting that this is a guarantee that there are no inaccuracies of any kind in it. (128). But again, it is a deliberate choice to interpret this statement as requiring inerrancy, not the necessary outcome.

This motivation seems to be driven by the idea that if the scriptures are not inerrant, we will not have a “rock-solid foundation” on which “we may firmly place our confidence.” (23). But this is a deeply modernist assumption, one that stems from the scientific revolution’s insistence that empirical evidence is the only acceptable or reasonable type of evidence. By this logic, if the scriptures are not perfectly empirically accurate, they are not trustworthy. There’s no reason to concede this point, however, so it is a stunning irony that the authors continually argue that believers should refuse to trust in the arm of the flesh except on this point, where apparently refusing to trust in the arm of the flesh by privileging empirical evidence above everything else is tantamount to disregarding the scriptures.

In a vacuum, there’s no problem with this approach. But life doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and this approach relies on false dichotomies, as illustrated above with the authors’ treatment of the documentary hypothesis, to create rigid lines and propositions of belief. It creates a brittle faith that is often admirably strong until one day it tumbles like a house of cards. Taking the book’s discussion of the documentary hypothesis as an example again, this approach requires the complete rejection of the hypothesis or else the Book of Mormon is false. Therefore, a single compelling piece of evidence for the documentary hypothesis can cause a domino effect that swiftly results in the person thinking that rejecting the Book of Mormon is a necessary consequence of accepting the documentary hypothesis. But it’s not! In terms of ameliorating faith crises, this approach to scripture doesn’t seem useful and neither does the book, which seems to be preaching to the choir more than addressing believers currently experiencing a faith crisis.

I’m leaving so much on the table still: the bizarre forward, in which a non-historian explains that all history is fiction; the anecdotes in the introduction about graduate study in history that simply do not represent the state of the field; the strange framing of the authors’ argument within the Hofmann story, and their treatment of Hofmann himself as either one of the greatest forgers or an obvious fraud depending on who is being fooled; the contradictory relationship the authors have with credentials and expertise, in which they decry them as trusting in the arm of the flesh or note them as evidence of the correctness of the point being argued, seemingly determined by whether the credentials and expertise in question support or disagree with the authors’ chosen position (see 122 in particular); the delicate balance performed to avoid directly stating that most Church leaders did not see the New Mormon History as the betrayal of the Restoration that the authors insist it is; the strange emphasis on family connections and guilt or authority by association; the historicity of the gospels; and still so much more, but this is long enough as it is.

[Michelle Van Dyke · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of history, given in a very factual, unbiased way. Don’t get me wrong. I know the author is supportive of and runs the Joseph Smith Foundation, so I know where they stand. Still, the material was not opinionated. It simply presented what happened and lets the reader interpret how they feel about what actually happened. I appreciate this non manipulative approach. At times this book is very informative and interesting but mostly too long for me. The author has some blow your mind, fantastic videos. Never any I didn’t like so I’ll stick with those.

[Vicki · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and a 'Traditionalist.' I found this book to be interesting and faith affirming.

Favorite Quote: Bruce R. McConkie, considered one of the Church's foremost authorities on doctrine, stubbornly refused to accept Hofmann's find as authentic-insisting that something was eerily wrong. Elder McConkie told his son, Mark, "He did not know anything about Mark Hofmann but he did know Joseph Smith, and what he saw in those documents was not Joseph Smith. (p.28)

[Margaret J · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is so compelling I couldn't put it down. It presents intriguing history stemming from the efforts of progressive LDS historians to rewrite Church history. It gives riveting evidence that members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have not been lied to--that the faithful Church history we have been taught for nearly 200 years is true! I believe this book can help anyone who might be experiencing a faith crisis, due to the progressive New Mormon History.

[Threesa L · Rating 5 out of 5]

After watching so many friends struggle with their testimonies because of perceived deception. Finally a book to help them and us understand what has happened and that the faith-filled stories we were taught and loved were true.

I cannot recommend this book enough. It helps those who are struggling and those who love someone who is struggling.

[Kaylene Stoddard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved reading this book; it was very insightful, and I appreciated how well documented it was. It does a great job of explaining the history and background of the progressive movement in the church history department and other intellectual institutions like BYU. Well written and easy to follow. I highly recommended it.

[Avid reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an insightful alternate perspective to many of the more progressive narratives of our faith’s history that have come out in recent years. It is well researched and notated.

[Tori · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a big no.

[Scott Browning · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is not what I expected. In the forward to the book, the authors say “all history is fiction, some better, some worse”, then they attempt to destroy the credibility of all professional historians. The authors go on to say that this book is a recounting of events by “non-professional historians, ones not limited by the prejudices of the professional historians.” Personally, I don’t think that’s something to brag about. The authors throw the credible historians, under the bus. This is a lousy excuse for parents of children who have lost their faith because of church history to feel they’re right for continuing to believe, and their children have been deceived by the evil professional historians. It doesn’t matter if those historians were Bishops, Stake Presidents, and Patriarchs, like Richard Bushman.

If you’re one of those parents, go ahead and read the book. It’s worth a read but not worth a star. Talk about this with your child. Find out why they don’t believe. Continue to believe in the church, that’s fine, but don’t let your religion destroy your relationship with your children.

I read this book because my mother is reading it. Trust me, these authors (not professional historians) got it wrong.

[Greg Rampton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent and balanced

Excellent exposition of the tug of war between so-called progressive historians and traditionalists and the issues and hidden agendas. Using the Mark Hoffman forgeries and murders to begin the exposition, the book draws you in and lays it all out. It’s helpful to have an honest background book to explain the controversies.