Does the Church Suppress Truth-Seeking? — The Honest Answer

Critics quote Boyd K. Packer that some true things are “not very useful,” and Dallin H. Oaks that “research is not the answer,” and set these against earlier leaders who invited investigation. The tension is real. The conclusion drawn from it is not — and it collapses the moment every statement is quoted accurately and in full context.

The Standard This Page Holds Itself To

A charge this serious deserves to be tested by a simple rule: if the evidence does not exist, neither does the claim. Much of the case that the Church “suppresses truth” is built on quotations that are misattributed, misdated, stripped of context, or simply invented — words no leader said, in settings that never occurred. So this page will do what careful inquiry requires and what the critics often do not: every statement below is quoted in its real words, traced to its real source, and read in its real context. The reader is invited to follow each citation and verify it. We ask of the critics only the standard we accept for ourselves.

Held to that standard, the honest picture is this: the Church’s leaders, early and modern, have repeatedly and on the record invited investigation; the “cautionary” statements critics cite say something narrower and wiser than the slogans suggest; and the institution’s actual conduct — not its words, its deeds — has been to publish its hardest history to the whole world.

The Invitation to Investigate — On the Record

Confidence, not concealment, is the older and louder tradition. In 1871, the Apostle George A. Smith — then a counselor in the First Presidency — stated the principle plainly from the pulpit:

George A. Smith — Journal of Discourses 14:216 (13 Aug. 1871)

“If a faith will not bear to be investigated; if its preachers and professors are afraid to have it examined, their foundation must be very weak.”

(This statement is often misattributed to President George Albert Smith and misdated to 1903. The correct author is the earlier Apostle George A. Smith, and the date is 1871 — a small illustration of how loosely these quotations are usually handled.) Nearly a century later, President Hugh B. Brown, First Counselor in the First Presidency, made the same charge to the rising generation at Brigham Young University:

Hugh B. Brown — “An Eternal Quest—Freedom of the Mind,” BYU, 13 May 1969

“Preserve, then, the freedom of your mind in education and in religion, and be unafraid to express your thoughts and to insist upon your right to examine every proposition. We are not so much concerned with whether your thoughts are orthodox or heterodox as we are that you shall have thoughts.”

In the same address, President Brown warned against the very arrogance that genuine suppression requires — the pretense of having nothing left to learn: “Our revealed truth should leave us stricken with the knowledge of how little we really know. It should never lead to an emotional arrogance based upon a false assumption that we somehow have all the answers—that we in fact have a corner on truth, for we do not.” This is not the voice of an institution afraid of inquiry.

The same conviction is recorded in the private papers of President J. Reuben Clark, later a counselor in the First Presidency. Reflecting in 1917 on the duty to test one’s conclusions, he wrote a line his biographer preserved — words written not for an audience but for himself: “If we have truth, [it] cannot be harmed by investigation. If we have not truth, it ought to be harmed” (quoted in D. Michael Quinn, J. Reuben Clark: The Church Years, 1983, p. 24). A man does not write that in his private notes unless he means it.

The Statements Critics Cite

Against that tradition, critics set two statements above all. Both are genuine. Quoted in full and in context, neither says what the slogan version claims.

Verified, and Addressed Below

• Boyd K. Packer (1981) — “Some things that are true are not very useful.”
• Dallin H. Oaks (2019) — “I suggest that research is not the answer.”

The question is not whether these words were spoken — they were. The question is what they mean, and whether they amount to a policy of suppressing truth. Read in context, they do not.

Packer “Not Very Useful” — A Point About Teaching, Not Hiding

Elder Boyd K. Packer’s line comes from a 1981 address to religious educators on how to teach Church history. The surrounding sentences make the subject unmistakable — it is pedagogy, the wisdom of timing, not the concealment of facts:

Boyd K. Packer — “The Mantle Is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect,” 22 Aug. 1981

“There is a temptation for the writer or the teacher of Church history to want to tell everything, whether it is worthy or faith promoting or not. Some things that are true are not very useful.”

His concern was that teaching true things prematurely or out of context can wound rather than build: “Teaching some things that are true, prematurely or at the wrong time, can invite sorrow and heartbreak instead of the joy intended to accompany learning.” He drew the analogy himself to a teacher who does not begin a child’s education with advanced or adult material. (Notice, too, what the popular paraphrase does: critics frequently render this as Packer saying true history “can do damage” — but the word damage appears nowhere in the address. The slogan is sharper than the man.)

Every teacher in every field makes judgments of sequence and timing. A physician who does not open a fragile patient’s first consultation with every worst-case scenario is not suppressing the truth; he is exercising judgment about when and how. That is Packer’s point — not that history should be hidden, but that it should be taught with care.

Oaks “Research Is Not the Answer” — Read His Whole Sentence

In February 2019, President Dallin H. Oaks spoke to young married members in Chicago about spouses whose questions of Church history and doctrine had led toward inactivity, and about how to respond. He did say the words critics quote — but the critics almost never quote the sentences that follow, which define his meaning:

Dallin H. Oaks — Chicago devotional, 2 Feb. 2019 (Church News)

“I suggest that research is not the answer. … the best answer to any question that threatens faith is to work to increase faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Conversion to the Lord precedes conversion to the Church. And conversion to the Lord comes through prayer and study and service.”

Two facts dismantle the anti-research reading on the spot. First, in the very same answer President Oaks prescribed “prayer and study and service” — study is in his prescription, not banished from it. Second, in that same address he directed couples to the Church’s Gospel Topics Essays — the Church’s own scholarly treatments of the hardest historical questions — as the place to take those very issues. A man who sends you to the research is not telling you to stop researching.

His actual point is one any honest epistemology grants: when a faith crisis is at stake, study alone is not sufficient to resolve it, because faith in Christ is not the kind of knowledge that fact-gathering by itself can supply. A professor who tells a struggling student “memorizing more formulas is not the answer” is not opposing study; he is saying a deeper mode of engagement is required. Oaks said the same of faith. He had said it years earlier, too, with research explicitly honored:

Dallin H. Oaks — PBS “The Mormons” interview, 2007

“There are two ways to truth: science and revelation. … Keep your life in balance by continuing to do the things necessary to keep open the channels of communication to heaven as well as to scholarly journals.”

“As well as to scholarly journals” is not the language of a man at war with research. It is the language of a man who insists on both ways to truth, and warns against abandoning either.

The Internet Age — A Charge to Engage, Not Evade

If the Church were committed to suppression, the internet would be its enemy and silence its strategy. The opposite is what the record shows. In 2016, the Apostle M. Russell Ballard told the Church’s religious educators that the day of deflecting hard questions was over — and that teachers must now meet them head-on:

M. Russell Ballard — CES address, 26 Feb. 2016

“Gone are the days when a student raised a sincere concern and a teacher bore his or her testimony as a response intended to avoid the issue. Gone are the days when students were protected from people who attacked the Church.”

He urged teachers to become familiar with the Gospel Topics Essays and to address difficult history openly, observing that “many of our young people are more familiar with Google than they are with the gospel.” A church bent on suppression does not stand before its teachers and command them to stop avoiding the hard questions and start answering them.

The Decisive Evidence: Deeds, Not Words

Quotations can be argued. Conduct cannot. And the Church’s conduct over the last decade is the single fact that the suppression thesis cannot survive.

Beginning in 2013, the Church published on its official website a series of more than a dozen carefully sourced Gospel Topics Essays on its most contested subjects — plural marriage and its practice in Nauvoo and early Utah, the multiple First Vision accounts, the priesthood and temple restriction on members of black African descent, the translation and historicity of the Book of Abraham, Book of Mormon and DNA studies, a Mother in Heaven, and the doctrine of becoming like God. These essays do not spin or evade. They state the difficulties directly and footnote their sources. An institution bent on concealment does not compose its most uncomfortable history into formal essays and post them where the entire world can read them.

Alongside the essays stands the Joseph Smith Papers Project — a multi-decade, peer-reviewed scholarly edition, produced to professional documentary-editing standards and made freely available online, that publishes Joseph Smith’s journals, revelations, histories, and legal and financial records, including documents that raise hard questions. A church hiding from its founder’s history does not fund the most exhaustive and transparent publication of that history ever attempted, and give it away to its critics. These are not the acts of an institution suppressing truth. They are the acts of one staking its credibility on the confidence that the truth will bear examination — precisely as George A. Smith said it must.

The Genuine Tension — Honestly Granted

None of this requires pretending the tension is imaginary. Every faith tradition, and every family, navigates the line between encouraging inquiry and protecting the vulnerable from poorly-timed or context-free information — and the Church has navigated it imperfectly. Some leaders, at some times, have said things that discouraged legitimate inquiry, or that were too easily heard as “don’t look.” That is a fair criticism, and an honest defense concedes it without flinching.

It is also worth measuring against the wider field. The Catholic Church maintained an Index of Forbidden Books into the twentieth century; numerous Protestant institutions have dismissed faculty for publishing honest historical-critical findings. Judged by an absolute ideal, every tradition falls short. Judged against its peers, and especially against its own conduct since 2013, the Latter-day Saint record on open inquiry is not the outlier critics need it to be.

The Verdict

Strip away the misquotations and read what was actually said: early and modern leaders inviting investigation; two “cautionary” statements that, in context, counsel wise teaching and a balanced epistemology rather than concealment; and an institution that has published its hardest history to the world. The critics have identified a real and human tension. They have not identified a policy of suppression, and they have not — this is the deeper point — identified any evidence that the underlying truth claims are false.

That is the move worth naming. A church that handles the tension between faith and scholarship imperfectly is not thereby shown to be untrue; it is shown to be led by humans. The argument from “suppression” quietly substitutes an institutional critique for the question that actually matters — is it true? — and hopes no one notices the swap.

The early leaders set the standard, and the modern Church has spent a decade and a fortune meeting it: if a faith cannot bear investigation, its foundation is weak. The Gospel Topics Essays and the Joseph Smith Papers are that confidence made visible — an open declaration that this faith can bear it. The invitation, then, is the one the Saints have offered all along: investigate. Read the sources. Follow the citations. Hold us to the evidence — and hold the critics to it too.