The idea that we need “Opposition In All Things” is canonized in the most correct book on earth, The Book of Mormon (2 Nephi 2:11). Church leaders over the years have talked about the need for this opposition, even if it involves challenging some of our truth claims. Probably one of the most famous is from J. Reuben Clark
If we have truth, [it] cannot be harmed by investigation. If we have not truth, it ought to be harmed.
J. Reuben Clark, as recorded by D. Michael Quinn, J. Reuben Clark: The Church Years. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1983, p. 24
Another quote that has worked its way into LDS thought is by the late biblical scholar and theologian Austin Farrer.
It is commonly said that if rational argument is so seldom the cause of conviction, philosophical apologists must largely be wasting their shot. The premise is true, but the conclusion does not follow. For though argument does not create conviction, the lack of it destroys belief. What seems to be proved may not be embraced; but what no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned. Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish.
Austin Farrer
In plain Bishop Bill English (minus the misspellings), he is saying that without push back to ideas, belief in those ideas cannot grow, and in fact will be destroyed
While that does not sound very Mormon in todays Church, it was in fact accepted by some of our leaders. Marion D. Hanks quoted the above in his book “A More Excellent Way” in 1966, and used it in a talk to the Church Education System. The big surprise is that Dallin Oaks quoted it at a dinner to (wait for it….) Church Apologist in 2002! In effect he was saying that we need to have the argument with Church critics, because it will build up belief.
Contrast that to what now President Oaks said at a BYU devotional earler this year:
An abundance of speculation and false information in podcasts and on social media surrounds us. Some may protest or question the truth of Church doctrine without knowing or even understanding the fulness of that doctrine.
Don’t be persuaded by false or inaccurate information. Discuss your concerns with faithful, well-informed friends and always take those concerns to the Lord.
Dallin H Oaks, BYU Devotional, Feb 10, 2026
If the members only listen to “faithful, well-informed friends”, then they will never hear the opposition, they will never have the argument that will build up belief (which he himself quoted 25 years ago).
What do you think of the Austin Farrer quote? What do you think of Oak’s reversal on this? Does he want apologists to engage the critics of the Church, but then wants the average member to stay as far away from these critics as possible?
Wheat & Tares 
My problem with Oaks saying “Discuss your concerns with faithful, well-informed friends…” is how it isolates people with questions. Let’s say I confess to a friend at church that I have an unresolved concern about Joseph Smith. To that friend I am now neither “faithful” or “well-informed” because a faithful, well-informed person wouldn’t have a concern about Joseph Smith. If that friend does shares my concern, they shouldn’t discuss it with me (per Oak’s guidance). If that friend doesn’t share my concern, they will be dismissive. Neither of those is helpful.
My therapist recently shared a model she called the “Emotional Closeness Cycle” which is how our vulnerability with someone can lead to more trust or more distrust. We can be sharing with just one person, or with an organization. First I need to define one term. Self-disclosure –> “Self-disclosure is the deliberate act of sharing private, personal information, thoughts, and feelings with another person.”
This cycle goes one of two ways:
Self-disclosure –> Vulnerability –> Validation –> Trust –> More Self-disclosure
OR
Self-disclosure –> Vulnerability –> No Validation –> Distrust –> Less Self-disclosure
The church has a pattern of treating real and pressing concerns with no validation. This directly sows distrust. If the church wants more of people’s trust, they need to find a way to validate people’s concerns. I think this is why the post-mormon/exmormon community has so strong of an influence, because they give people the validation that the church and it’s members don’t.
Sorry for the long comment, but one last thing. Jeff Strong gave a great example in his book “Torn” of how a bishop could be validating to a member with real and pressing concerns.
(pg. 227) (Authority without Control)
“I’m not trying to be difficult,” Mark said. “I just feel increasingly out of place. Some of the history troubles me, and some of the policies don’t sit right with my conscience.” The bishop listened, hands folded. He felt the familiar pressure to explain the doctrine, to protect boundaries, to steady things. Instead, he collected himself before responding. “Thank you for trusting me with this,” he said. “Can you help me understand what part has been hardest for you?”
When Mark finished, the bishop nodded. “I want you to know something,” he said. “I’ve had some of these same questions myself. They’re good questions.”
He didn’t offer answers. He didn’t redirect.
“Your honesty doesn’t change your place here,” he added. “We need people here with your courage and heart. Know you are among friends.” Nothing was resolved, but trust was strengthened.
—————-
I’ve heard that quote before but interpreted differently.
I think what church leaders are using it to say is that apologetics is a necessary arm of the church apparatus, even though it does very little to attract people to the church or convince them to join (emotional experiences with missionaries and church members do that).
What apologetics is for is to create just enough argument against the critics to keep members active when they experience doubts. Even if the arguments apologetics presents are unsound, they still “maintain a climate in which belief may flourish.” It’s enough that the arguments exist, whatever their quality.
“In effect he was saying that we need to have the argument with Church critics, because it will build up belief.”
Maybe I’ve missed understood you–but I think he would’ve said that we need to have the argument so that belief isn’t *destroyed* by the critics. Perhaps a distinction without much of a difference…
I have lost all interest in apologists such FAIR. I am not afraid of nuance or unresolved questions. I appreciate their sincerity.
Jack, Kirkstall, yes, I can see that. I think they two interpretation are related, with the same goal. What I thought they were saying is that criticism against any idea makes those ideas stronger as it fleshes out the strong parts, and discards the weak. But I can see the problem with that interpretation as it would be difficult to discard Church truth claims even if proven wrong, though it has been done (removing the idea from the intro the BofM that the American Indians are descendants from the Laminates). maybe what Oaks was saying is just as you stated: Yes, argue with them, you may not be able to discard their claims, but the fact you are pushing back saves the faith of weaker members who might be swayed.
On the Austin Ferrer quote. The idea is that strong belief requires argument. Believers in religious traditions of all kinds, particularly ones that make extraordinary truth claims such as Mormonism, often don’t have much evidence, so they resort to argument when challenged. It is argument first, facts second kind of thinking. In the secular fields of science and history, it is the opposite. Facts come first, then argument. The best research is so fact-based that not much argument is needed to persuade the audience. The facts almost just speak for themselves. The researcher simply uses argument to boil down an overwhelming body of facts for the audience to more easily digest, but details an extensive body of data and resources in the footnotes for a more specialized audience to dive into if interested.
There are different ways of knowing. I’ve used this example before–but I can say with great confidence that I know my wife loves me. But how do I prove that in a lab or on paper? The facts undergirding my claim are subjective and therefore rather mushy. But what I can do is provide an argument for my claim by bringing my wife in as a witness or speaking of the positive aspects of our relationship or what-have-you.
So how many LDS have faithful, well-informed friends? The problem is that not many people in the average ward are well-informed about LDS history or doctrinal history or just plain doctrine and theology. In the average ward, it may very well be zero, with no one in the entire ward being well-informed in the sense that most W&T readers would endorse. I’m being honest here — most LDS don’t read books anymore, much less books about LDS history written by historians, so almost no LDS are “well-informed” about anything related to the Church. The LDS correlated curriculum is partly to blame here, as well as the pivot toward emotional testimony.
So, just to throw it out there (and noting that I am still deciding where I sit, what I believe), the information climate of 1966 was quite different from the information climate of today –
Would any of us truly argue that much of what is consumed as information on Facebook, TikTok, etc., is “rational argument,” let alone “well-informed”? I mean, just look at how we got to where we’re at politically in the US with respect to how well-informed the majority of the electorate is in the US. If we want to compare and contrast statements from 1966, 2002, and 2026, perhaps we should be willing to also factor in what has changed just with respect to information availability and source.
“If the members only listen to “faithful, well-informed friends”, then they will never hear the opposition, they will never have the argument that will build up belief (which he himself quoted 25 years ago).” I agree but only in terms of “opposition” that is, itself, “well-informed,” but I don’t believe this blog post actually takes that into account when trying to call out Pres Oaks on what the OP seems to believe is a contradiction in Oaks’ own position.
If we consider the style of the Charlie Kirks of the world, perhaps Oaks’ most recent statement tends to look a bit more reasoned and not merely reactionary….
Jack, I don’t think anyone disputes that there are different ways of knowing—some empirical, some experiential, some objective, and some subjective. I think, however, that your example actually further supports the critics’ claim.
That your wife loves you is not necessarily, as you suggest, an observable and provable fact—though that itself may be debatable depending on whether we understand love as something enacted rather than merely a sentimental feeling. But even granting your framing, your assertion supports the idea that experience can constitute knowledge without requiring scientific verification.
The problem, as I see it, is that the LDS world has all but reduced the Holy Ghost to a kind of divine fact-checker, which I believe is a category error. Feelings can be profoundly trustworthy when it comes to certain kinds of truth and brutally unreliable when it comes to others.
When the primary question posed after reading the Book of Mormon is, “Is this book true?”—meaning, “Is this objectively and historically what it claims to be?”—we have effectively turned love into a science experiment. There may well be truths contained within the book that quicken the spirit, illuminate something about the human condition, or transform the reader. But to conclude that a spiritual experience is therefore attempting to establish an objective historical fact is to write checks that experience itself cannot cash.
The issue isn’t whether spiritual experience is a legitimate form of knowledge. It is whether we are asking it to answer questions that belong to an entirely different category.
If Abinadi is a fictional character, then I am going to drink beer and listen to Bon Jovi.
Todd S,
I believe that revelation belongs to a larger category–but not necessarily to a different one. I agree that many elements can be answered by ways of knowing that don’t need the intervention of revelation. But because revelation belongs to a larger category that subsumes all others (the spirit knoweth all things) it can speak to the truth of any and all things.
I like what President Oaks says in his essay on reason and revelation: he says (in so many words) that reason should have the “first word” and that revelation should have the “last word.” In other words we should start with our own powers of reason when faced with a question or problem–and often we’ll find that we don’t need to go any further than working through things with our mental faculties in order to find a satisfying solution. But if revelation were to come that might steer us towards a different solution then we allow it to have the “final word” despite the positive results of reasoning through things on our own.
Re: emotions: I think this is a legitimate concern–and something that many of us need to work through as we mature in the faith. And my sense is that the saints generally learn how to detect what comes from above versus what doesn’t by being cognizant of the fruits of the spirit in their lives. This is a real experience–and one that is no respecter of persons. All who strive to live in a way that is amenable to the presence of the Holy Ghost will receive a greater degree of its influence in their daily walk.
Jack, if I had verifiable evidence that your wife was having an affair, oh say, I caught her with my husband, then my kind of knowledge trumps yours. Factual knowledge is just more solid than squishy feelings. Thankfully, for both of us, I have no such facts. And my squishy feeling that my husband loves me is good enough for me to base my life on and follow him from one end of the earth to the other with his military career.
It is the same with religion. There are squishy feelings, like things that just ring so true, in the Book of Mormon. I had a really hard time looking at facts that said the book is not what it claims. Those feelings were so strong that I really didn’t want to know the facts, like there were no elephants or horses in the Americas at the time the BoM was supposed to have happened, or that the DNA says the native Americans are not House of Israel, and that there really is no place in the Americas that actually matches the geography that is in the BoM. Knowing those facts is like catching my husband in bed with your wife. It challenges what I *know* emotionally.
This is where the apologists come in. And I am going to confess that I do NOT read apologetic stuff….except… Once I picked up a Sunstone magazine because I saw an article written by a guy I went to school with. He was one of the brilliant nerds in school, so I knew the article he produced would be fact based and brilliant, and it was. He had this one theory that took ALL of those BoM problems and solved them. The story in the BoM didn’t happen on the American continent. He had this map of Asia with a perfect fit to BoM in Indonesia and there were horses and elephants, wheels and steel, DNA that is House of Israel. Only problem was getting the gold plates to America so Joseph Smith could find them. That problem is so much simpler than trying to believe the horses, elephants, wheels, steel, and the DNA all disappeared without a trace from the American continent.
A *good* apologist argument takes the inconvenient facts and shows how that emotional stuff we want to believe can still be true because there is another way of looking at the facts. Like after I look in my bedroom and see a couple with what LOOKS like my husband in the bed, my husband walks in from outside and says, “My brother’s house got flooded and they haven’t had any sleep in two days and with the repairs, they just can’t afford a motel, so I told them they can can crash in our bedroom for a few hours. I hope that is OK with you.” That is like an apologist’s explanation for how I can keep believing my emotional beliefs. It may even strengthen my emotional beliefs.
Chet, don’t forget the Irish nachos. I hear they pair well with Bon Jovi.
A quick word of agreement with AdamF (or at least a similar thought I’ve often had). Uchtdorf’s encouragement to “doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith” has taken a lot of strays, but it’s very vague advice–easy for either side of an argument to find their own rightness in it (which makes it on par with basically all Mormon prophetic advice).
A lot of critics of the church said it’s a thought-stopping technique to quash legitimate doubts about problematic things like polygamy, BOM historicity, prophetic counsel that doesn’t hold muster, etc. But part of the reasoning process should be to both listen to doubts and to doubt doubts, to listen to our gut feelings, and to question our gut feelings. We shouldn’t assume that our doubts are as legitimate as our beliefs. For example, vaccine skeptics “doubt” the effectiveness of vaccines, and the trust others have in scientists is a type of faith. Taking stands based strictly on feelings is very human and often wrong, but those feelings could be doubts or could be misplaced trust (faith). Even evidence and facts can be problematic. 9/11 truthers use “facts and evidence” to confirm their feelings that the government was behind it all. Flat earthers also use “facts and evidence” as do those who believe that ancient aliens built the pyramids. People who believe the moon landing was faked use “facts and evidence.”
In all cases, they apply their amateur understanding of complex things to question the experts–another prophetic trait, LOL (see the 5th “fundamental” in following the prophet which is about the most culty talk ever given in the church).
Now, when it comes to apologetics, the problem with the majority of those is that they apply the “Dumb and Dumber” rule. You know the line, when he’s told there’s a one in a million chance, and he says “So you’re saying it’s POSSIBLE.” We also have to apply other types of thinking like Occam’s Razor and a preponderance of evidence.
The line Hawkgrrrl is looking for is: “So you’re saying there’s a chance.”
I think this whole discussion has confused two definitions of the word argument. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition, OR, an argument is two people disagreeing with each other. (It isn’t just the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says.)
The Austin Farrer quote is not about needing to have disagreements with people in order to defend the faith. It is about creating rational explanations demonstrating the intellectual strength of beliefs. Good apologists set out to compose their thoughts into a compelling argument, not to go disagree with people who believe differently. These compelling arguments may be beneficial to members who have doubts, and are by definition almost certainly going to be created by “faithful, well-informed” people. I don’t think this is a reversal from Oaks at all. He wants members to look to LDS apologists for rational explanations of LDS beliefs, and doesn’t want members to head to the internet for, well, much of anything.
For anyone coming from the starting position that the Church is always right, this is a wholly logical way to think of things. No one outside the church is ever going to be better able to explain how the church is right than someone inside the church is, so there is never a purpose in looking elsewhere for information.
Of course, for anyone who doesn’t start with that premise, that logical *argument* isn’t going to hold any water. Personally, the church has taken and defended too many positions that conflict with my understanding to goodness that I can’t accept the Church generically or it’s President specifically as automatically correct about things, and as such I must be willing to look outside the Church for opinions. I seek information from without, and seek justification via my own internal morals.
Anna,
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I believe that a lot of apologetic work does exactly what you portray in your final paragraph–that is, they provide a new paradigm within which we can measure known facts and perhaps interpret them in meaningful ways that we hadn’t yet considered. And in that light, I’m of the opinion that there are good explanations for most of the difficult questions regarding the Book of Mormon’s claims about itself–though, of course, there remain some difficult questions that don’t have good answers yet and that may never be answered–that is, until the day when Lord reveals all things.
Re: feelings and emotions: I appreciate your insights with regard to the inner workings of human emotion. I’m guessing that you’ve had a lot of experience working with folks whose hearts and minds have been damaged by abuse and other mortal difficulties.
That said, I agree that the spirit works primarily through thoughts and feelings. IMO, that’s how it brings us along without overwhelming us–a little at a time. But there can come a point when spiritual knowledge is just as real and knowable–if not more so–as anything in the physical world. And that’s because (IMO) the holy spirit is a living thing. It hails from living beings–and it enlarges our perspective of reality over time so that we come to see things as they really are. And that goes along way towards assuaging our concerns about unanswered questions–though that’s not to say that we’ll receive an answer to every question that may plague us. Even so, I can say that because I know the Lord answers my prayers I’m confident that he’ll continue to help me sort things out along the way–that is, as difficult questions continue to arise.
We do the best we can — but even when talking to faithful church members, one can still get information that is “spectacularly wrong.”
Elder Dallin H. Oaks, in an Associated Press interview in 1988: If you read the scriptures with this question in mind, “Why did the Lord command this or why did he command that,” you find that in less than one in a hundred commands was any reason given. It’s not the pattern of the Lord to give reasons. We [humans] can put reasons to revelation. We can put reasons to commandments. When we do, we’re on our own. Some people put reasons to [any particular revelation] and they turned out to be spectacularly wrong. . . .
AP: Are you referring to reasons given even by general authorities?
Elder Oaks: Sure. I’m referring to reasons given by general authorities and reasons elaborated upon [those reasons] by others. . . . The reasons turn out to be man-made to a great extent. . . .
It sounds like the only way to make you feel comfortable is if I agree with you. I can’t empathize, without adopting your concerns as my own?
Its also very judgmental to assume that if I am a faithful follower I am an idiot. Dave B: you have no idea what books are on my nightstand or anyone else’s for that matter. That’s a BIG claim to say that there are ZERO people in any given ward that actually understand the history and doctrine of the Church. Do you hear yourself?
Opposition in all things, as seen by church leaders, only exists as something to juxtapose their authority against so they can dole out judgement on people with different opinions. It’s not seen as a beneficial thing that’s meant to temper some of their (out of control) arrogance.
The problem I have with revelation having the last word is that we all get “different” revelations. What does that mean? What happens when “my” revelation from God about the church not being up to God’s standards regarding women is in conflict with the revelations of others. Using “revelation” is often a way of shutting down conversation, because how can you fight with God? People have told me to pray about my questions, but those same people think I’m being deceived when I don’t get the answer they want.
I have a hard time taking this too seriously knowing that Dallin Oaks excoriated those who doubted the Salamander letter. He said they were lacking in spirituality, faithfulness, and imagination because they didn’t consider that the salamander was a symbol of the spirit of God (or some such), and all the while Mark Hoffman who forged the letter which was a total invention with no basis in reality was laughing at how easy it was to fool top church leaders into paying large sums just because they wanted a thing to be true.
In my experience, on just about every issue, the final revelation we should all seek is “God is love.” When we step outside our narrow preconceptions, and recognize that there is beauty and truth woven into the very fabric of the universe, into the very beings and thoughts of those we frequently oppose, it is time to remove our shoes, for the ground upon which we stand at that point is holy. View the world and its inhabitants as God views them.
I like what Old Man says: God is Love. How do God and Love operate when there is opposition in all things? So much of the church is spent excluding, not including.
This is just my anecdotal experience–I’ve gotten the sense in the church over my 40ish years that “opposition in all things” has typically been pigeon-holed into good vs evil. When we talk about opposition, we are talking us the “good” being challenged by them the “bad”. It feeds the emotional and intellectual position of certainty we take as the “only true and living church.” The existence of opposition to our cause is the theological sign that we are on the “right path” because otherwise, there wouldn’t be opposition. Honestly, this is the case the entire BoM lays out and I think we’ve done ourselves a great disservice in perpetuating it. We still see the vestiges of this belief when you have someone like Oaks saying it is not okay to critique church leadership, even when the critique is right. And I think we’ve done ourselves a great disservice framing opposition in a right/wrong, good/evil dichotomy. Over the last few years in my deconstruction, I’ve kind of had this personal epiphany. “Opposition” is what keeps me from floating into space or sinking into the ground. They are forces that just exist and are neither good nor bad. In fact, that kind of neutral opposition is 99% of our lived experience. Even push back we get from most people on ideas is neutral opposition a lot of time. Yet–we’ve been conditioned to impose right vs wrong, good vs evil on all of that. And it is this imposition of good vs evil on top of everything that stifles any inquiry into difficult topics and makes us just downright avoidant. So when you have revelation, that we automatically assign as “good”, any opposition to it is “evil” and just reinforces the “good” position of the revelation without actually allowing for any introspection into actually whether it is in fact “good”. We self-select ourselves right out of engagement then–or at least the church encourages us to do that–because anything evil is not worth engaging. So I really wonder if we are actually even capable of doing or learning good sometimes when we are encouraged and then often do remove ourselves from the tension. It’s like we worship the ideas of agency, free-will and “coming here to learn” but then when the rubber hits the road, we realize we actually preferred Satan’s plan and just want someone to tell us what to do so we don’t have to figure it out. And more tongue and cheek–I don’t think Satan would have even been met with push back from most church members, all he had to do was setup a “only true and living church” and everyone would have gladly handed over their agency and happily did whatever he told them to do–because that it so much easier and that is what our church org really highlights with how it is currently run.
chrisdrobison:
“Honestly, this is the case the entire BoM lays out and I think we’ve done ourselves a great disservice in perpetuating it.”
The Book of Mormon boldly states that the “right way” is to believe in Christ. So, yes, it clearly defines right and wrong in terms of the choices we make relative to that claim. But it also adds a lot of nuance vis-a-vis what we do with our belief in the Savior–especially as per Alma chapters 12 and 32. There are examples all through the text of experience and/or doctrine having to do with the inception of belief and how nurture it–and then how to bring it to maturity. The BoM is really quite remarkable in how it nails down core beliefs in black and white terms and, at the same time, provides a nuanced approach to comprehending and growing those beliefs.
Jack,
Nuance and BoM don’t belong in the same sentence. Because in the BoM there save two churches only, belief can only grow into certainty and we are headed for either heaven or hell. We love the easiness of “just love and live.” Nephi said it himself, he delights in plain and simple. Jack, there is no nuance in comprehension in the BoM because it ultimately leads you to bucket EVERYTHING into one of two buckets: of God or of the devil–that’s it. Which all serves to prove my point–we just want things easy and laid out for. If the BoM lays out things in black and white–as you say–it is by definition, without nuance. As much as we say we love the idea of freedom, agency and ability to “act,” as the BoM puts it, we thrive when being “acted upon”–when things are all laid out for us, when the choices are made for us, when we don’t need opposition at all. You’d think with all this talk of needing opposition to grow, we’d be a little more skeptical of Lehi’s dream which a single path with a rod that literally takes you where you need to go, no questions asked and no personal growth needed (and no the mists of darkness are not grow opposition). I can’t remember where I was at yesterday, but we literally sell t-shirts with the covenant path all laid out in 5-6 easy steps depicted on an easy road. It’s just a few ordinances, the temple and then heaven–super easy, no opposition required, see missionary for details.
However, I think JS hit a reality after he penned the BoM that didn’t match his. It was then that he developed a better theology of opposition and struggle. The God of the BoM is very predictable and very transactional. The God in the OT, church history often doesn’t show up and for some reason we constantly feel the need to explain that way so we can try to maintain the black/white, simple, covenant path view. And yes, I think that does disservice to our ability to show up for ourselves and other people.
And by “just love and live” and I meant “just look and live”
chrisdrobison,
I think a good example of what I’m saying is found in Moroni 7. In verse 12 Mormon says: wherefore, all things which are good cometh of God; and that which is evil cometh of the devil. That’s very straightforward black and white. But then he goes on to explain what makes something inherently good or bad and then how to identify it. And then he goes further by explaining the complex mechanism by which the Lord has made it possible for us to continue in the good until we become the children of Christ.
That said, another interesting aspect of Mormon’s sermon is that he leaves the door open for good to be found by anyone who searches in the Light Christ–a gift that he says is given to everyone who comes into the world–and that means (potentially) that anyone anywhere can judge between good and evil. And I think that goes a long way towards helping Latter-day Saints to be open to the good that may be found throughout the world.
At any rate, that’s the sort of thing that I believe the Book of Mormon does really well–a nuanced exposition of a black and white proposition.