Jared and John talk about the church's Gospel Topics Essays

The Gospel Topics Essays: Transparency Without Infrastructure

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released its Gospel Topics Essays beginning in 2013 as a landmark exercise in institutional honesty. The essays tackled subjects the church had long sidestepped: polygamy, the Book of Abraham's actual Egyptian papyri, DNA evidence and Native American ancestry, and the practice of folk magic in Joseph Smith's early life. On paper, the move looked like a watershed moment for transparency. In practice, according to recent discussion on the Mormon Stories Podcast, it revealed a deeper problem: the church acknowledged its historical complications without building any mechanism to help ordinary members process them.

This gap between disclosure and pastoral support represents a critical failure in institutional communication that deserves serious scrutiny.

When Transparency Becomes Performative

The Gospel Topics Essays were not discovered by historians or journalists. They were written by church historians and theologians, then quietly uploaded to the church's website with minimal announcement. The essays themselves are substantive: they acknowledge polygamy as a foundational practice, not an aberration. They concede that church leaders engaged with magical worldviews in the early 19th century. They present the actual scholarly consensus on the Book of Abraham rather than repeating the official narrative most members learned in Sunday school.

Yet the church's own leadership structure was not prepared to disseminate or explain them.