BYU Professor Brings CES Letter To Life through Art - Anthony Sweat | Ep. 1985 | LDS Discussions 60

Anthony Sweat, a Brigham Young University religion professor and painter, has spent years creating religious art that attempts to reconcile the CES Letter with orthodox Mormonism. His paintings depict Joseph Smith translating golden plates with a seer stone buried in a hat, multiple contradictory First Vision accounts merged into single scenes, and other historical complexities that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints spent decades calling anti-Mormon lies. According to the Mormon Stories Podcast episode examining his work, Sweat’s project represents something unprecedented: an institutional artist tasked with visualizing the very historical problems that once justified excommunications.

The CES Letter and the Art of Damage Control

Jeremy Runnells published the CES Letter in 2013, a document that compiled straightforward questions about Book of Mormon historicity, prophetic succession, and Joseph Smith’s polygamy. The Church dismissed it as hostile propaganda. Runnells was excommunicated in 2016. Yet the questions refused to die. Younger members encountered the same discrepancies through the South Park episode "All About Mormons" (2003) or through earlier efforts like the anonymous "Images of the Restoration" website, which an attorney created to depict actual historical events without devotional gloss.

Sweat enters this history as both a product and a weapon of the Church Educational System. He worked thirteen years in CES before joining BYU’s faculty. His paintings now hang in Church magazines and visitors' centers, depicting scenes that previous generations of Church artists were forbidden to show. The Mormon Stories Podcast hosts note the bitter symmetry: the institution that punished Runnells for documenting history now pays a professor to paint it.

Blending Contradictions Into Single Frames

The podcast analysis, hosted by John Dehlin with guests Julia and Nemo, examines specific Sweat works with forensic attention. One painting attempts to depict the First Vision by combining elements from Joseph Smith’s four contradictory accounts (the 1832 version mentioning only Jesus, the 1838 version with two personages, the presence of angels, varying dates). Sweat places angels in the background, adds the familiar pillar of light, and includes details from each account into one cohesive scene.