The “Open Door” Argument — Did Treasure Seeking Let a Deceiving Spirit In?

A newer line of attack concedes that Joseph Smith was sincere, concedes that the fruits look good, and then argues that his early treasure seeking opened a spiritual door through which a deceiving spirit entered. The argument fails on chronology, on its own sources, on the text of Deuteronomy 18, and on its structure.

The Claim

Strip the rhetoric and the argument has three moving parts:

• A factual premise. Joseph used a seer stone to search for lost objects and buried treasure, appeared before a justice of the peace in 1826, and went to Salem in 1836 in connection with a treasure report.
• A scriptural premise. Deuteronomy 18:10–12 calls divination detestable.
• A causal claim. Therefore a spiritual door was opened, and a deceiving spirit came through it and authored everything that followed.

The first premise is largely true, and Latter-day Saints should say so plainly. The second is true as far as it goes. The third is where the whole thing collapses. Where exactly? In four places: the chronology, the sources it cites, the text of Deuteronomy 18, and the structure of the argument itself. Each one below.

1. The Chronology Runs Backwards

This problem is fatal on its own. The argument requires divination first, the door opening second, and visions third. Here is the actual order, using dates neither side disputes.

The founding vision precedes the stone by about two years and the paid treasure work by five. So how does the argument survive that? Only by being restated this way: a door opened in 1825 let something in, which then reached backward through time and caused a vision that had already happened in 1820. Is that a claim about spiritual discernment? No, it is just a broken timeline.

The ordering only works if the First Vision is quietly deleted from the sequence, which is what a phrase like “as a young man in the 1820s” accomplishes. It compresses a decade so the order stops being visible. So ask it directly. Which came first, the 1820 vision or the 1825 Stowell contract? The argument needs the second to precede the first, and it does NOT.

2. The Ritual Apparatus Is Missing

Here is a point that almost never gets made, and it matters more than it looks. The “open door” argument leans on Deuteronomy 18. So read what Deuteronomy 18 actually lists.

Deuteronomy 18:10–11

“There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer.”

That is a list of ritual ACTS: child sacrifice, divination, observing times, enchantment, witchcraft, charming, consulting familiar spirits, wizardry, and necromancy. What it describes is a cult with an altar, an invocation, and a transaction with a spirit being on the other end of it. So what does the record actually show Joseph doing?

He looked in a stone to try to locate lost property, and that is the whole of it. There is NO altar, no blood, no invocation of a spirit by name, no necromancy, no summoning, and no attempt anywhere to bind or bargain with anything. He NEVER sacrificed an animal, never cut a covenant with a spirit, never asked a familiar spirit for a word, and never conducted a rite of any kind. In his own 1826 testimony he said the practice hurt his eyes and that he had given it up, which raises an obvious question. Is that how a man talks about a ritual he believes is channeling supernatural power?

Why does this matter so much? Because the “open door” framework is built on the idea of a transaction. A door opens because something was offered and something was received. But where is the offering in Joseph’s record? There is none. The argument needs a ritual and does not have one.

Where the sacrifice stories come from

Critics do sometimes claim otherwise, so it is worth knowing exactly where those claims originate. Two threads get braided together, and they should be pulled apart.

The first is the black sheep story, in which Joseph Smith Sr. supposedly took a sheep to bleed as an offering at a dig. It comes from one place: William Stafford’s December 1833 affidavit, collected by Doctor Philastus Hurlbut and printed in E. D. Howe’s Mormonism Unvailed in 1834. Who was Hurlbut? A man disciplined by the Church, brought before a judge over a threat against Joseph, who then gathered the affidavits for the express purpose of destroying him. Richard L. Anderson’s study of the collection found Hurlbut’s hand throughout: repeated phrasing and parallel structures across statements from supposedly independent witnesses. And Stafford’s own son John, a physician, was interviewed in 1881 and said of the neighborhood stories, “They never stole one, I am sure,” and that his father “was never connected with them in any way.” Anderson’s conclusion is that the family’s doubts, combined with Hurlbut’s editing, cast serious doubt on the affidavit as a historical document.

The second thread is a genuine record of a rooster sacrificed at a Palmyra dig to propitiate a guardian spirit. That was done by Luman Walters, a travelling conjurer who worked the same region and charged for it. He was a different man. Critics who cite the episode as evidence of Joseph’s ritual practice are attributing one person’s act to another.

So the position here is not that nobody in 1820s New York did such things, because plainly some of them did. The point is that the record puts the ritual apparatus in other people’s hands, and the only source placing any of it in the Smiths’ hands is the single most compromised body of testimony in early Church history. So press for specifics. Which ritual is Joseph supposed to have performed, and which source says so? The answer is Hurlbut every time, and the follow-up question about Hurlbut is not a comfortable one for the person making the charge.

3. The Sources Cited Refute the Claim

This version of the argument makes a point of sourcing itself to the Church’s own material, which is good, so let us actually read the material it cites.

The Treasure Seeking page

The Church History Topics page on Treasure Seeking gets cited as though it were a confession pried loose. Its final two paragraphs say this:

Church History Topics, Treasure Seeking

“Stowell trusted Joseph, sought his assistance in seeking treasure, and even took his advice to finally give up the hunt. Joseph Smith Sr. considered his son’s ability sacred and hoped he would cease using it to look for earthly treasures. As Joseph prepared to translate the Book of Mormon, he was commanded to have nothing further to do with those who sought treasure and instead use his gift to translate and seek revelation.”

“God gave Joseph Smith power to translate the Book of Mormon, redirecting Joseph’s use of the seer stone toward work of a spiritual nature.”

Is that an unclosed door? It is the exact opposite. The page describes an explicit break, a commanded separation from treasure seekers, and a redirection of the gift. The critic cited the source and stopped one paragraph short of the part that answers him.

The 1826 hearing

The argument says Joseph “was brought before a court” and leaves the reader to supply the word convicted. The Church’s page on Joseph Smith’s 1826 Trial says something considerably more complicated.

• Four accounts survive, and all four suggest Joseph suffered no serious legal consequences afterward.
• They do not agree on who brought the charge. Benton says the public did; Purple says Stowell’s sons had him arrested as a vagrant; the purported court record says Stowell’s nephew Peter Bridgeman did. They also disagree over who testified.
• The outcome is unresolved. A purported record says guilty. A neighbor said the court condemned Joseph but let him go for his youth. A friend of the judge who claimed to have taken notes wrote that the judge accepted Stowell’s testimony and discharged him.
• Gordon Madsen’s legal analysis is the decisive piece. A guilty verdict would have required the judge to send Joseph to a bridewell and to file a document naming the defendant and charge along with a statement of the conviction. He did neither. The nearest bridewell has no mention of Joseph Smith for 1826, and no courthouse records name him.

Then there is the detail that guts the framing entirely. Josiah Stowell, the man supposedly defrauded, testified for Joseph. The Church’s page says Stowell trusted him and appreciated his work, and the Treasure Seeking page adds that Stowell took Joseph’s advice to give up the hunt. Stowell later joined the Church and stayed. So did Joseph Knight, another employer from the same period.

The alleged victims became the alibi. Do a con man’s marks testify for him in court, take his advice to stop paying him, and then follow him for the rest of their lives?

The Elders’ Journal quote

The 1838 line about digging for money gets presented as a gotcha, with the observation that the Church published it. It comes from a question-and-answer column in which Joseph answered the standard list of hostile questions put to Latter-day Saints. He was not caught. He answered a published charge in his own voice, in the affirmative, and joked about the wages.

There is a general point here worth pressing. This method treats institutional transparency as evidence of guilt. But where did the critic get these facts? From the Church, which published them. Does an organization concealing a demonic origin build a public reference library covering its founder’s money digging, his 1826 hearing, his seer stones, his divining rods, and his failed Salem trip, and then footnote the hostile sources on the way? If disclosure counts as confession, then no amount of honesty can ever help.

4. Deuteronomy 18 Does Not Say What the Argument Needs

Read past verse 14

The quotation always stops at verse 12. Verses 15–22 are the same speech, in the same breath:

Deuteronomy 18:15

“The LORD thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me; unto him ye shall hearken.”

Is Moses prohibiting mediated divine knowledge? No, he is prohibiting Israel from going to the Canaanite sources for it, and in the very next sentence he turns around and tells them exactly where to go instead. The chapter is a contrast rather than a ban: NOT the necromancer, but the prophet. Then verse 22 supplies the test, which is whether the word comes to pass. Using this chapter against a prophet means taking the passage that establishes the prophetic office and turning it into a tool for abolishing prophets.

The same Torah commands the use of objects

If the disqualifier is a physical object used to obtain divine knowledge, the Law of Moses is the first casualty.

Commanded in the Law

• Exodus 28:30 — Urim and Thummim commanded into the high priest’s breastplate
• Numbers 27:21 — Joshua to be counseled by the judgment of Urim before the Lord
• Leviticus 16:8 — casting lots commanded on the Day of Atonement
• Joshua 18:6–10 — lots cast before the Lord to divide the land
• 1 Samuel 23:9–12 — David uses the ephod to ask two yes-or-no questions and gets two answers

And beyond the Torah

• Numbers 21:9 — the bronze serpent, which heals those who look at it
• 2 Kings 6:6 — Elisha throws a stick in the water and the axe head floats
• 2 Kings 5:10 — Naaman must wash seven times in one specific river
• John 9:6 — Christ makes clay with spittle and applies it to a blind man’s eyes
• Acts 19:11–12 — handkerchiefs carried from Paul’s body heal the sick
• Acts 5:15 — Peter’s shadow
• Acts 1:26 — the apostles cast lots to fill Judas’s seat, after the Resurrection

So where is the biblical line actually drawn? Never at object versus no object, but always at source: the LORD, or not the LORD. The argument has substituted a category scripture does not use for the category scripture actually uses, and then judged Joseph by the substitute rather than by the real standard.

“Seer” is a biblical office

1 Samuel 9:9 is explicit: “he that is now called a Prophet was beforetime called a Seer.” When Joseph’s neighbors called him a seer they were using a King James word for a prophetic office, not importing a pagan one. The Book of Mormon’s own definition in Mosiah 8:13–17 makes the instrument secondary and the divine commission primary. No man can look in the interpreters except he be commanded.

One more item, offered without much comment. Joseph of Egypt had a silver cup “whereby indeed he divineth” (Genesis 44:5, 15). Same Hebrew root the argument leans on. The text does not condemn him.

5. The “Open Door” Premise Is Not in the Bible

Here is the quiet move at the center of the whole thing, and it deserves to be named. Everyone in the conversation agrees divination is condemned. That was never in dispute. What the argument needs is something far more specific, and it never states it as a premise: that a forbidden practice creates a permanent, latent spiritual access point, a legal right, which survives repentance and stays open to be exploited later.

So ask for the verse. Not a verse condemning divination. A verse establishing the mechanism itself, meaning transferable, persistent demonic access that survives repentance. Where is it? There is not one. That framework is twentieth-century deliverance-ministry theology, with its open doors and legal rights and generational curses. It has real currency in some circles and NO textual basis. The argument smuggles in an extrabiblical demonology while quoting Isaiah 8:20 at Latter-day Saints for not going by the text.

What the Bible actually says about the past

Ezekiel 18:21–22

“If the wicked will turn from all his sins that he hath committed... all his transgressions that he hath committed, they shall not be mentioned unto him.”

Add 1 John 1:9 and Isaiah 1:18. Where does the open-door model put any of that? It has no room for it. Under that model forgiveness cleanses the record but leaves the breach standing. Is that the God of Ezekiel 18?

The rule proves too much

Run the rule across scripture and watch who fails it.

• Moses was raised in Pharaoh’s house and “learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians” (Acts 7:22), trained in the world capital of the very arts Deuteronomy 18 lists. He then receives the Law, including Deuteronomy 18. Disqualified?
• Manasseh “used enchantments, and used witchcraft, and dealt with a familiar spirit, and with wizards” (2 Chronicles 33:6). He also caused his children to pass through the fire, which is the first item on the Deuteronomy 18 list. Six verses later God is entreated of him, hears his supplication, and restores him to his kingdom. So the door closed. Disqualified?
• Saul of Tarsus was by his own account the chief persecutor of the Church and present at a killing. Then a blinding light and a voice, which is the exact phenomenology this argument flags as suspect. Disqualified?
• The Ephesian converts burned their books of curious arts (Acts 19:19), and Ephesus immediately became the site of some of the most extraordinary miracles in the New Testament.
• Simon the sorcerer was rebuked for trying to purchase the gift and told to repent (Acts 8:20–22). He was not told the door was permanently open.
• The magi were astrologers, precisely the professional class Deuteronomy 18 condemns. God gave them a star and a dream, and they were the first Gentiles to worship Christ.

Applied consistently, this principle deletes Moses and Paul from the canon. What do you call a rule that does that? The wrong rule.

6. The Argument Has a Name, and It Is from Matthew 12

Read the structure of the accusation carefully: the works are conceded as real, the source is reassigned to the adversary, and any good in the works is then re-read as camouflage for the deception. Where have we seen that before? It is the Beelzebub charge, move for move. Christ’s opponents could not deny the exorcisms, so they relocated the power: “This fellow doth not cast out devils, but by Beelzebub the prince of the devils” (Matthew 12:24).

How did Christ answer it? Not with a defense of His methods. He answered structurally.

Matthew 12:25–26

“Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation... And if Satan cast out Satan, he is divided against himself; how shall then his kingdom stand?”

Apply it here. If a deceiving spirit is the author, then it produced a book whose stated purpose on the title page is convincing Jew and Gentile that Jesus is the Christ. It produced a centerpiece in which the resurrected Christ descends, invites a multitude to feel the wounds in His hands and side, teaches the Sermon, blesses their children, and institutes the sacrament (3 Nephi 11–18). It produced Alma 7:11–13, one of the most detailed atonement passages in any scripture. It produced 2 Nephi 25:26, where we talk of Christ and rejoice in Christ so our children may know to what source to look for a remission of their sins. It closes with an invitation to come unto Christ and be perfected in Him (Moroni 10:32). And it built a church whose largest visible outputs are humanitarian relief, sobriety, family formation, and tens of thousands of missionaries preaching Christ.

Satan divided against Satan. Where is the kingdom that gets built by this?

One further note, and it should be made gently rather than swung as a club. It is precisely at the end of this exchange, and in direct response to this exact move, that Christ gives the warning about attributing the work of the Holy Ghost to an unclean spirit (Matthew 12:31–32). That belongs in the record. “I’m just asking a question” is not a costless posture when the question is that question. Let the reader draw the conclusion.

7. Four Tests Cited, and None of Them Run

Once you see this pattern you cannot unsee it. Every scripture the argument invokes contains a stated, falsifiable criterion. In all four cases the summons gets quoted and the criterion gets dropped.

1 John 4:1, which gives its test in verse 2

“Try the spirits whether they are of God” is verse 1. Verse 2 is the instruction manual: “Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God.” John gives the test in the next sentence, and it is Christological. So why does the criterion get dropped while the command gets invoked? Because the Book of Mormon passes it on nearly every page.

2 Corinthians 11:14, which is about content

Is Paul’s warning about Satan appearing as an angel of light a warning about instruments? Read ten verses earlier, where he names what he is guarding against: another Jesus, another spirit, another gospel. His marker is doctrinal content, not method. So run his test. Is the Christ of the Book of Mormon another Jesus? Born of Mary, atoning in Gethsemane and on the cross, resurrected the third day, the Son of God and judge of all. That is the Jesus of the New Testament.

Isaiah 8:20, which needs verse 19

Verse 19 is the setup: “And when they shall say unto you, Seek unto them that have familiar spirits, and unto wizards... should not a people seek unto their God?” What is Isaiah’s complaint? That Israel consults mediums INSTEAD of God. And his remedy is not to consult nobody. It is to seek unto your God. The word rendered testimony in verse 20 means witness, which is the category of a second attesting witness. Isaiah 8:20 is a strange club to swing at a book subtitled Another Testament of Jesus Christ. Note also where the passage goes next: unto us a child is born. It runs toward new prophetic revelation, not away from it.

Deuteronomy 18:22, the test skipped entirely

The chapter the whole argument is built on ends by giving the actual test for a prophet. Does the word come to pass? That is empirical and falsifiable. The prohibition got quoted and the test in the same chapter got omitted. Four tests cited, ZERO run. Why? Because each one, applied, favors the thing being attacked. That is why the command gets quoted and the criterion never does.

8. The Argument Is Built So It Cannot Lose

Watch what happens to every possible piece of evidence under this framework.

Every input, including the exculpatory ones, gets converted into confirmation. The line about sincerity is doing particular work. It sounds gracious, but what is its function? To disarm the believer’s own testimony in advance so it cannot count as evidence.

So there is one question that actually tests the claim. What evidence, if it existed, would show that Joseph Smith was not demonically deceived? Name it specifically. If nothing could, then this is not a historical or scriptural argument at all. It is an unfalsifiable one, and 1 John 4:1 commands testing, which requires a criterion that can fail.

The argument form also has a pedigree worth knowing. It was used on the primitive Church, “the way which they call heresy” (Acts 24:14). It was used on Paul, who in Acts 16:16–18 was correctly identified by a girl with a spirit of divination and cast the spirit out anyway. So a true statement can come from the wrong source. Which direction does that cut? Both, and it undercuts any argument built purely on association. And it was used on Christ, who was accused of a demonic power source and of being a Samaritan with a devil (John 8:48). If the argument form disqualifies its target, it disqualified Jesus first.

Where Overreach Would Cost You

A few places where saying too much loses ground that the record already gives you.

• Do not deny or minimize the treasure seeking. It is documented, the Church says so, and denial hands over the frame. Concede it fully and fight on chronology, exegesis, and structure.
• Do not flatly assert that he was acquitted. The sources conflict. Say the record is disputed and that no conviction documentation exists which New York law would have required. That is stronger because it is exactly true.
• Do not claim Joseph abandoned the stone. He used it in translation and reportedly kept it for years. The Church’s word is redirected. Use theirs.
• Do not lean on “everyone was doing it.” It is true and it belongs in a footnote, but as a main defense it silently concedes that the practice is the real issue.
• Do not weaponize Matthew 12:31–32. Note the structural parallel and let them draw the conclusion. Swing it as a threat and you become the aggressor and lose every neutral reader.
• Salem is the strongest card on that side. Handle it directly rather than dodging. It is answered in full on this site under “Salem, 1836 — The Treasure Trip and D&C 111.”

The Verdict

The “open door” argument needs divination first and visions afterward, and the First Vision precedes the seer stone by two years and the Stowell contract by five. It needs a ritual transaction, and the record shows a young man looking in a stone for lost property, with all the altars and blood and invocations belonging either to other men or to the Hurlbut affidavits. It needs Deuteronomy 18 to ban mediated revelation, and that chapter instead promises a prophet and then hands you the test for identifying one. It needs a doctrine of persistent demonic access surviving repentance, and NO such verse exists anywhere in scripture.

So what is left? The Beelzebub charge. Concede the works, reassign the source, re-read the good as camouflage. Christ answered that a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand. If a deceiving spirit wrote a book whose stated purpose is to convince the world that Jesus is the Christ, and then built a church that sends out tens of thousands of missionaries to preach Him, how does that kingdom stand?

Four tests were cited and none of them were run, and that is the whole case.