In the ongoing pursuit of clarity, charity and understanding, today we'll look at a post from one of my other blogs regarding the clarity brought by Royal Skousen to the conversation about the origin of the Book of Mormon. Most of this post is adapted from that one.
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A priority in our day is the elimination of contention. In the April 2026 General Conference, President Oaks said,
My brothers and sisters, as followers of Christ, let us follow Him by forgoing contention and by using the language and methods of peacemakers.
My blog nomorecontention.com has been discussing this topic since April 2023.
Contention arises from the compulsion people feel to have others agree with them, whether by persuasion, coercion, compulsion, or any other means. An antidote is to pursue instead these three values: clarity, charity and understanding.
Forgoing contention through apathy does not make peace. It does not foster unity. Instead, it represses resentments and misunderstandings, enabling them to accumulate.
Clarity is the predicate or foundation for unity. And, because so much contention arises from our LDS academics, their theories, and their efforts to obtain acceptance of their theories, we should all thank Royal Skousen for stating the obvious about the implications of SITH (the stone-in-the-hat narrative about the origin of the Book of Mormon).
The unity I refer to is not a unity of belief, but
(i) unity in knowledge (clarity),
(ii) unity in charity (love and good faith), and
(iii) unity in understanding (acceptance and appreciation for differences without a compulsion to have everyone think the same).
Unity among Latter-day Saints on the questions of the origin and setting of the Book of Mormon will naturally follow once everyone recognizes that their opinions are based on their respective assumptions about whether Joseph and Oliver told the truth.
We can all be faithful, productive, harmonious Latter-day Saints when we accept the reality that some of us accept what Joseph and Oliver taught, while others reject what they taught, without insisting everyone must do one or the other.
IOW, unity through diversity.
But for that to happen, we must all be crystal clear about the facts and their implications. And we must fully own our respective beliefs without trying to enforce our own through censorship, obfuscation, and sophistry.
In Part Seven of his series The History of the Text of the Book of Mormon, Brother Skousen makes plain this reality: everyone who teaches SITH is also teaching that Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery deliberately misled everyone about the origin of the Book of Mormon.
Skousen writes,
"Joseph Smith’s claim that he used the Urim and Thummim is only partially true; and Oliver Cowdery’s statements that Joseph used the original instrument while he, Oliver, was the scribe appear to be intentionally misleading."
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While this point has been obvious to those of us who still believe what Joseph and Oliver taught about the origin and setting of the Book of Mormon, the various scholars who promote SITH have managed to skirt the issue by simply not telling their followers what Joseph and Oliver taught.
For example, the LDS scholars who wrote Saints (vol. 1), the Gospel Topics Essay on Book of Mormon Translation, innumerable articles, commentaries, videos, podcasts, etc., have carefully avoided Brother Skousen's point by simply omitting what Joseph and Oliver taught about the origin of the Book of Mormon.
But Brother Skousen has "unvailed" the truth about SITH.
To be clear, I completely disagree with Brother Skousen's conclusion, which is based not on facts per se, but instead on a series assumptions and inferences he makes.
To his credit, he does explain some of his assumptions and inferences. But unfortunately he leaves others unstated.
We've discussed some examples on this blog, such as here
https://www.ldshistoricalnarratives.com/2025/03/royal-skousens-excerpt-technique.html
and here
https://www.ldshistoricalnarratives.com/2024/12/creating-narrative-with-selective.html.
The key point is that every Latter-day Saint should recognize that Brother Skousen's conclusion about Joseph and Oliver intentionally misleading everyone necessarily follows from the SITH narrative.
We all agree that people can have different views. Multiple working hypotheses are part of life and should be easy to accept and understand in the spirit of charity, but this only works in a climate of clarity and openness.
Let's all work together to identify facts and separate them from assumptions, inferences and theories, so that each of the multiple working hypotheses can be fairly and accurately evaluated as people make their own informed decisions.
This is the FAITH model of analysis.
