A friend called me a few years ago, voice tight, and said something I've heard more than once: "I just found out about _________, and nobody ever told me." The blank changes — polygamy, the translation process of the Book of Mormon, the priesthood and temple restriction, the Kirtland Safety Society. The feeling doesn't. It's a specific kind of vertigo, like discovering that the house you grew up in had rooms you never knew existed.
If you've felt that, you're not weak. You're not faithless. You're awake. And you deserve a better conversation than either "just trust and don't ask" or "see, the whole thing is a fraud."
The God Who Told Us This Would Be Messy
Here's something that rarely gets mentioned in these conversations: the Restoration's own founding documents anticipate the problem. The very first section of the Doctrine and Covenants — the Lord's preface to the entire collection — says that these commandments were "given unto my servants in their weakness, after the manner of their language, that they might come to understanding." And then, remarkably: "inasmuch as they erred it might be made known" (Doctrine and Covenants 1:24–25).
Read that again. God didn't promise a history scrubbed of error. He promised a process — weakness, language, understanding, correction. The entire architecture of the Restoration assumes imperfect people doing imperfect work within a genuine divine framework. If you expected a spotless record, you were expecting something the scriptures themselves never offered.
That's not a dodge. It's a theology. And it's a theology with teeth, because it means the messiness is load-bearing. Ether 12:27 puts it plainly: "I give unto men weakness that they may be humble; and my grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me." The weakness isn't an accident God has to work around. It's a feature of how He works through mortals — including prophets.
Main and Secondary Questions
Elder Lawrence E. Corbridge gave a BYU devotional in January 2019 that deserves more attention than it gets. Called "Stand Forever," it came from a uniquely qualified place: as part of a Church assignment, he'd read through vast amounts of material antagonistic to the Church. "There may not be anything out there of that nature I haven't read," he said.
His observation was precise. He distinguished between what he called primary questions and secondary questions. Primary questions are things like: Is there a God? Is Jesus Christ the Son of God? Was Joseph Smith a prophet? Is the Book of Mormon the word of God? Secondary questions — and there are thousands of them — are the historical, cultural, and procedural questions that multiply endlessly.
His point was not that secondary questions don't matter. It's that they will never resolve themselves if you haven't first worked through the primary ones. And if you have settled the primary questions through genuine spiritual experience, then secondary questions become workable. They become rooms you can walk into rather than cliffs you fall off.
I find this framework genuinely useful — not because it lets you dismiss hard questions, but because it helps you ask them in the right order. A person who hasn't grappled seriously with whether God exists will process a question about Nauvoo polygamy very differently than a person who has received a spiritual witness and is trying to integrate new information into a living faith. Same question. Entirely different foundation beneath your feet.
Honesty Is Not the Enemy of Faith
For decades, well-meaning Latter-day Saints sometimes treated Church history like a fragile vase — handle with care, keep it on a high shelf, don't let anyone look too closely. That instinct came from love, but it backfired. When people eventually encountered the complicated parts on their own — usually online, usually without context — the shock was compounded by a sense of betrayal. Why didn't anyone tell me?
The Church itself has moved significantly on this front. The Gospel Topics essays, published on the Church's website, address subjects like plural marriage, the Book of Abraham, race and the priesthood, and the different accounts of the First Vision — openly, with footnotes, in a tone that respects the reader's intelligence. The Saints multi-volume history tells the story of the Restoration with both its miracles and its missteps. These weren't grudging concessions. They were deliberate choices to trust members with the full picture.
Elder M. Russell Ballard, in a 2017 BYU devotional, said plainly: "There is absolutely nothing wrong with asking questions or investigating our history, doctrine, and practices. The Restoration began when Joseph Smith sought an answer to a sincere question." He then added something that has stuck with me: "It is important to remember, I am a General Authority, but that doesn't make me an authority in general." He directed people to trained scholars and historians — and then, blessed by their work, to seek the guidance of the Holy Ghost.
That's a mature model. Study. Consult expertise. Pray. It doesn't shortcut the work, and it doesn't shortcut the Spirit. It asks you to use both.
What Honesty Actually Looks Like in Practice
So if someone you love comes to you rattled by something they've read — or if you're the one rattled — what does a faithful, honest conversation actually look like? A few things I've learned:
- Don't panic, and don't perform calm. The worst thing you can do is immediately launch into defense mode. The second worst thing is to minimize what the person is feeling. "Oh, that's no big deal" has probably driven more people out of the Church than any anti-Mormon pamphlet. Listen first. The question beneath the question is almost always: Can I be honest here and still belong?
- Separate the historical question from the theological question. "Did Joseph Smith practice plural marriage?" is a historical question with a clear answer: yes. "What does that mean about his prophetic calling?" is a theological question that requires more careful, prayerful work. Conflating the two creates unnecessary crises. Almost every difficult historical issue has this same two-layer structure.
- Acknowledge what you don't know. There are things in our history I still don't fully understand. The priesthood and temple restriction is one of them. I believe the Church's disavowal of the racist theories used to justify it. I believe the 1978 revelation was genuine. I also don't pretend to have a tidy explanation for why the restriction existed in the first place. Saying "I don't know" isn't a failure of faith. It's a refusal to manufacture false certainty, which is its own kind of honesty before God.
- Remember that context is not the same as excuse-making. When we learn about historical figures, we need to understand the world they lived in — not to excuse wrongdoing, but to understand what was happening and why. Nineteenth-century America was a different moral, social, and religious landscape. That context doesn't make every decision right. It does make the story more human and more true.
President Dieter F. Uchtdorf addressed this directly in his October 2013 General Conference talk, "Come, Join with Us." He said: "I suppose the Church would be perfect only if it were run by perfect beings. God is perfect, and His doctrine is pure. But He works through us — His imperfect children — and imperfect people make mistakes." Then he acknowledged openly that "some have stumbled because of mistakes made by men." And he offered that now-famous counsel: "Please, first doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith."
That line sometimes gets reduced to a bumper sticker. But in context, it's preceded by an honest admission that the Church's history includes real imperfection — and followed by a genuine invitation to stay, to wrestle, to belong. It's not "shut up and believe." It's "hold on to what you've received while you work through what you don't yet understand."
A Theology That Can Carry the Weight
Here's what I think the restored gospel offers that many other frameworks don't: a theology that actually accounts for the messiness of its own history.
If you believe that God works exclusively through flawless instruments, then any imperfection in Church history becomes a fatal problem. But if you believe — as the Doctrine and Covenants teaches — that God works through weakness deliberately, that His commandments come "after the manner of their language," that error can be "made known," that those who seek wisdom can "be instructed," and that the humble can "be made strong, and blessed from on high, and receive knowledge from time to time" (D&C 1:24–28) — then you have a framework robust enough to hold both the divine and the human without collapsing.
Doctrine and Covenants 93:24 defines truth as "knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come." That's a striking phrase — as they were. A commitment to truth, by this definition, requires a commitment to the past as it actually happened, not as we wish it had happened. You cannot love truth and fear history at the same time.
And D&C 50:24 offers this quiet promise: "That which is of God is light; and he that receiveth light, and continueth in God, receiveth more light; and that light groweth brighter and brighter until the perfect day." Note the trajectory. It doesn't say you'll have full light now. It says the light grows. The picture gets clearer over time — but only if you stay in the process, only if you continue.
What You Can Do This Week
If this topic is live for you right now — if you're wrestling with something specific — here's what I'd suggest. Pick one issue that's bothering you. Go to the Church's website and read the relevant Gospel Topics essay. Read it slowly, including the footnotes. Then read the primary sources it cites. Then sit with it. Pray about it — not for a feeling that makes the hard thing disappear, but for the ability to hold complexity with faith. Ask God to help you see more clearly, not more simply.
And if someone in your ward or your family is struggling with something historical, resist every urge to fix it in one conversation. Instead, try: "That's a real question. I've thought about it too. Can I sit with you in this for a while?" That kind of companionship — the willingness to not have all the answers but to stay present — is closer to the spirit of the gospel than any airtight apologetic argument.
The Restoration didn't begin with an answer. It began with a fourteen-year-old boy who had the courage to say he didn't know. Every honest conversation about Church history is, in its own small way, a continuation of that same impulse — the belief that God is not threatened by our questions, and that light, received and continued in, grows brighter still.