Guest Post: Clint Teeples
For much of the twentieth century, it was an article of faith in American evangelical circles that the historical and intellectual claims of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would eventually collapse under scrutiny. The collapse was treated as inevitable. The only open question was when.
Critics searched for what one prominent evangelical leader later called a “smoking gun,” some clear mistake or exposure that would finally show the faith to be built on error.
It never arrived.
Two evangelical scholars, Carl Mosser and Paul Owen, published an unexpected assessment in Trinity Journal. After surveying decades of Latter-day Saint scholarship, they reached an uncomfortable conclusion. Latter-day Saints were producing serious, professional work. Evangelical critics were not keeping up.
Evangelicals, they warned, were “losing the battle and not knowing it.”
That judgment has aged remarkably well.
As Richard Mouw, one of the most respected evangelical leaders of his generation, later put it, “The problem with the typical evangelical historical effort to find a smoking gun in Mormon teaching is that it hasn’t been very successful.”
That sentence captures the shift. Critics kept looking for the clear proof that would expose the faith as mistaken. It never came.
This does not mean that Latter-day Saint claims are now universally accepted. They are not. But it does mean something more important. The long-standing assumption that those claims could be easily dismantled by history or scholarship has failed.
One reason is that Latter-day Saint scholarship is no longer confined to a small or isolated world. What was once dismissed as in-house defense is now published by Oxford University Press, discussed at major universities, and cited in mainstream academic journals. It is debated, criticized, refined, and taken seriously by scholars with no connection to the Church at all.
That was not supposed to happen.
Take the Book of Mormon. Once dismissed as an obvious nineteenth-century invention, it has been studied using the same tools scholars apply to ancient texts everywhere: literary structure, naming patterns, ritual forms, and cultural detail. None of this forces belief. But it has made the old explanations increasingly implausible.
The same is true of Latter-day Saint theology. Teachings once portrayed as wildly unchristian, such as God the Father having a body, or the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost being distinct beings, are now known to have been taught and believed by many early Christians. These ideas were common in the first centuries of Christianity before they were eventually ruled outside of Christian belief and replaced by theological frameworks shaped heavily by Greek philosophy. They are no longer historical oddities.
Temple worship follows the same pattern.
What critics once dismissed as invented or eccentric shows clear parallels to ancient temple practice: covenant-making, ritual progression, sacred clothing, and symbolic movement. These are not modern curiosities. They are ancient religious patterns.
Even the Book of Abraham, long treated as the weakest link, is now better understood through recent research that explains how it functions as an intelligible religious work rather than a laughable failure. Debate remains, but the old caricatures no longer hold.
It has not always been this way.
One of the most important turning points came from a critic, not a defender. In the mid-twentieth century, a Protestant minister named Wesley Walters devoted years to disproving the First Vision. He avoided rumors and attacks on character. Instead, he focused on a single historical claim: whether religious revivals actually occurred near Joseph Smith’s home around 1820.
Walters was effectively calling a bluff. If the historical setting collapsed, the vision collapsed with it.
What followed changed Latter-day Saint scholarship. Rather than retreat, historians responded with careful, sustained research. Newspapers were revisited. Church records were mapped. Revival culture was studied town by town.
The result stunned both sides. The revivals were there.
The ‘myth’ was history.
As the historian Richard Bushman later observed, Walters may have done more than anyone else to advance serious Latter-day Saint historical scholarship. The very methods meant to discredit the faith ended up strengthening its historical foundations. Rigorous academic standards became a protection rather than a threat.
That pattern has repeated itself ever since. Serious criticisms are raised. Latter-day Saint scholars respond by widening the evidence. Over time, the criticism weakens. Not because questions are avoided, but because they are met directly.
None of this replaces faith. Latter-day Saints themselves insist that spiritual witness, not scholarship, is the foundation of belief. Historical arguments do not convert hearts.
Academic Rigor Prevailed.
For generations, critics predicted that once Latter-day Saint claims were exposed to serious scholarship, they would collapse. The opposite happened. The scholarship grew stronger. The arguments became more careful. The easy dismissals stopped working.
This is what Mosser, Owen, and Mouw recognized earlier than most. The debate did not end because critics stopped asking questions. It ended because facts grounded in academic rigor prevailed.
By any reasonable historical standard, that is what winning looks like.
Clint Teeples
Author of “Latter-day Saints by Numbers: Research, Insights, and Outcomes” Purchase on Amazon