The Mormon Trick is the Christian Trick

We just have a better paper trail for one of them

Joseph Smith and Jesus Christ, more alike than we think? (Image created by the author in Midjourney.)

I grew up as an evangelical Christian. By the time I was old enough to explain what I believed and why, I had also absorbed a particular conviction about the Mormons: they were a cult. Not a faith, not a denomination, not a tradition. A cult — the word came pre-loaded with everything I needed to dismiss them: their prophet was a fraud, their scripture was made up, their witnesses were tricked, their certainty was the certainty of people who had been carefully manipulated into believing a lie. None of this was hard to see. The only reason Mormons can’t see it is because they are inside the cult.

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The Mormon witnesses, as the believers tell it

Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, said an angel named Moroni led him to a hill in upstate New York — the Hill Cumorah, near Palmyra — where a set of golden plates had been buried. The plates were inscribed in a language Smith called “reformed Egyptian,” which no one outside Smith’s circle has ever produced an example of, and which Smith translated into what became the Book of Mormon. The plates themselves were then returned to the angel and have never been available for examination by anyone outside the founding circle.

This is, on its face, an extraordinary claim. The standard apologetic response to skepticism leans heavily on the “witnesses.” The Book of Mormon contains, in its front matter, two published witness statements: The “Testimony of Three Witnesses” — Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Martin Harris — declares that an angel of God showed them the plates and that they know the translation is true. The “Testimony of Eight Witnesses” — mostly members or in-laws of the Whitmer and Smith families — declares that they handled the plates physically and saw the engravings.

These are real men. They had names and addresses. Their names were attached to a formal testimony that was published and has been published continuously for nearly two hundred years. And so the Mormon apologist asks a pointed question: if Smith invented the whole thing, why did eleven men — named, publicly, in print — stand behind the claim that they had seen exactly what Smith said he had?

The mundane explanation

Joseph Smith was, by every reasonable historical account, an obsessive and persistent personality. He was charismatic — people who knew him said so even when they disliked him. He was preternaturally certain of his own claims, and that certainty radiated outward and pulled in followers. He was also, by every account, relentless. He didn’t take no for an answer. He didn’t lose interest. He didn’t move on.

We all know people like this. Maybe not religious founders — most people who are like this never start a religion — but the basic personality type: the friend who decides you should go on a particular trip with him and brings it up in every conversation for six months straight. The relative who asks you the same favor on holidays for years until you give in just to make them stop. The politician who insists an election he lost was rigged and stolen and never lets it go.

Now picture that personality, with apocalyptic religious conviction underneath it, applied to a group of men who already trusted him, who were already in his social circle, and who already wanted to believe he was the prophet he claimed to be.

How hard would it be to get those signatures?

We do not need to know the exact conversation that produced the testimony in order to see how ordinary social pressure could produce something like it. Tell one signer that the wording is more figurative than it sounds. Tell another that it’s mostly for the benefit of skeptics and that no one will read it too literally. Tell another that you have already seen the plates yourself and that signing is really a vote of confidence in you, not a sworn statement about them. Tell another that the wording will be cleaned up before publication.

And, until they agree to your way of thinking, never let it go. Bring it up again the next day. And the day after. Ask in front of their family. Ask in front of their pastor. Ask when they are tired. Ask when they are conflicted. Ask until the cost of saying yes is less than the cost of saying no.

You do not need the golden plates to exist. You do not even need the signers to believe in the plates. You only need people who want to believe him, and you need the signers to want Joseph Smith to stop asking.

Once the testimony exists, you take it on the road. You show it to potential converts who do not know — and have no way of knowing — how it was obtained. To those new readers, the testimony looks exactly like what such a document is supposed to look like: an attestation by named individuals, in writing, that they witnessed a thing. The conversation about how the testimony was actually produced is happening only in the small circle of the original signers, and those signers have powerful reasons not to publicize that part of the story. Some of them now believe their own attestation. Some of them are too embarrassed to walk it back. Some of them have left the movement and have no interest in spending the rest of their lives correcting Mormon converts. Most of them just want to be done with it.

If they do revoke their witness testimony, you discredit them as heretics and RINOs. You make the social cost of betrayal so high that others see it being paid and learn the lesson silently.

And then they die.

The preservation asymmetry

Imagine the world as it actually was around the eleven witnesses in the 1830s. Two communities exist relative to this testimony. One community — the rapidly growing church of Latter-day Saints — treats the witnesses’ testimony as foundational. They print it. They reprint it. They cite it in conversion conversations. They teach their children it is true. They name buildings after the witnesses. They build an entire institutional memory around the claim that these signatures are independent attestations of a miracle.

The other community is everyone else: The neighbors who knew Joseph Smith was oddly obsessive and manipulative. The signers’ relatives who watched the pestering happen. The wives and adult children who knew what was said in the kitchen the night before. The drinking companions who heard the half-laughed admission that “I just signed it to shut him up.” That community has no project. They are not a movement. They are not preserving anything. They go home, they live their lives, they raise their kids, they die. Their accounts of how the testimony was actually obtained do not get transcribed, do not get printed, do not get organized into a counter-record. That knowledge lived in kitchens and conversations and offhand admissions — the ambient reality of the witnesses’ daily lives — and when those people died, their stories died with them.

Within two generations, the only surviving systematic record of the testimony’s provenance is going to be the believing community’s record. Not because the believers won an argument. Not because the skeptics gave up. But because only one side had a reason to keep talking about it.

This is the asymmetry. It is not that the skeptics were wrong, or even that they were silenced. It is that the believers had a use for the story and the skeptics did not. Two hundred years of selective preservation will turn the believer’s account into the only account, because no one outside the movement was investing time and labor in maintaining the alternative.

The standard Mormon apologetic move — if it was all made up, where is the testimony of the witnesses recanting? — proves less than apologists want it to prove. Continued affirmation may show continued commitment, but continued commitment is not the same thing as independent verification of the underlying event. The signers could have privately qualified what they meant, explained it in visionary terms, regretted the wording, or simply grown tired of arguing about it. Unless those qualifications were preserved by a community with a reason to preserve them, they would not necessarily survive. The believers had an institution. The skeptics had conversations.

It is, in fact, exactly what we would expect to see if the testimony had been produced in the way I described.

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The turn toward Christianity

What I have just walked you through is a structural argument. The argument has nothing in it that is unique to Joseph Smith or the LDS Church. There is nothing in it that depends on Mormonism being uniquely false or uniquely fraudulent. It depends only on three things: a charismatic personality with apocalyptic conviction, an in-group whose social standing has become bound up with the truth of his claims, and a preservation asymmetry between the believing community and the non-believing one. Those three ingredients produce manufactured witnesses, manufactured certainty, and a documentary record that two hundred years later cannot be refuted because the only people who cared enough to write things down were the people invested in not refuting it.

I am writing this essay as a piece of structured persuasion. I led with Mormonism deliberately.

The Christian witness story

Now. About Christianity:

A charismatic apocalyptic preacher in first-century Palestine attracts a small but fanatical following. He tells them the existing order is about to be overturned in a cataclysmic act of God: a “revealing” of their god’s authority and power over the gods of Rome. Instead, he is executed by the Roman State in a way that, for his followers, was psychologically intolerable — he was supposed to be the one through whom the apocalypse arrived, and instead he died like any other Galilean troublemaker. Within decades, a movement organized around the claim that he had been seen alive after his death is spreading through the eastern Mediterranean. By the late fourth century, Nicene Christianity had become the official religion of the empire that killed him.

The witness chain for the resurrection is the foundational claim of that movement. In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul lists appearances of the risen Jesus — to Cephas (Peter), to the Twelve (the disciples), to “five hundred brothers at one time,” to James, to all the apostles, and finally to Paul himself. The Gospels add the women at the tomb, the encounter on the road to Emmaus, the upper-room appearances, the doubting Thomas. The whole apologetic edifice rests on these witnesses. The standard apologetic line is the same as the Mormon line: if the resurrection claim was manufactured, how do we explain the early movement’s witness lists, its lack of surviving recantations, and the later tradition that its leading figures suffered for the claim?

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So, let’s apply the structural argument.

A charismatic figure with apocalyptic conviction — check. An in-group whose social standing, family relationships, and self-conception are now bound up with the truth of the claim — check. Two communities relative to the witness chain: one with a desperate use for the story, one with no investment in producing or preserving a counter-record — check.

Of course, the first century is not the 1830s. The preservation asymmetry there is not measured in decades; it is measured in centuries. The believing community produced gospels, epistles, apologetic literature, liturgies, creeds, councils, an entire literate institutional culture devoted to maintaining and elaborating the witness claim. The non-believing community produced nothing organized about Jesus of Nazareth specifically, because Jesus was, to them, a forgettable provincial nuisance.

The handful of non-Christian references we have — Tacitus, Suetonius, and Josephus, whose major Jesus passage remains debated — are passing notices, not records of investigative skepticism. The Jewish community produced a tradition that the resurrection claim was a fraud cooked up by the disciples, which the Gospel of Matthew itself preserves in the form of a story about Jewish authorities bribing the guards to spread a cover story (Matthew 28:11–15). We have, in other words, exactly the documentary trace we would expect if the resurrection witnesses had been produced the same way the golden-plates witnesses were produced, and time had done the rest.

Whatever happened in Jerusalem in the early thirties of the first century, the surviving witness record reflects what believers chose to preserve. It is not independent corroboration of the underlying event. It is one community’s organized memory, refined over centuries, with the dissenting versions either suppressed or never written down. The believers had a use. The skeptics had no interest.

The standard apologetic response — they died for the claim, they wouldn’t have died for a lie — is the same kind of move as the Mormon recantation argument, and it fails in the same way. We know it fails, because Joseph Smith died for his claim too. He was shot dead by a mob at the jail in Carthage, Illinois, in 1844, having never renounced the plates, the angel, or his own prophethood. By the Christian apologist’s own logic, that death should count as evidence that Mormonism is true — and no Christian apologist on earth accepts that conclusion.

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Apostles do not have to have invented the claim they proclaim. They only have to have come to believe it under the pressure of an obsessive personality, the social pull of an in-group, and the psychological cost of admitting they were wrong about the most important thing they had ever believed. Festinger’s cognitive-dissonance theory remains useful here, even though his famous UFO-cult case study has been criticized: the broader point still stands, which is that people often reduce psychological conflict not by abandoning a cherished belief but by reinterpreting events in ways that preserve it. Dying for a belief tells us something about the depth of the believer’s commitment. It tells us almost nothing about whether the belief is true.

The live case

If my argument still feels too abstract, just look around at our world today.

I have watched, in real time over the past decade, as a charismatic apocalyptic personality built a movement out of an in-group whose social standing and family identity is now welded to the truth of his claims. The MAGA movement is the resurrection witnesses, only with social media and cameras included. We can watch the manufacturing happen. We can read the X thread where someone signs the attestation — yes, the election was stolen — because the cost of continuing to push back has become greater than the cost of going along. We have watched as family members stopped recognizing reality in the pursuit of conspiracies and political identity. We can watch as the believers assemble a documentary record — selectively, urgently, with conviction — that the next generation will inherit as evidence.

And the cycle is also accelerating. Christianity took centuries; Mormonism took decades; MAGA may come and go in a little over a dozen years.

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The MAGA case is not just a parallel to the Mormon case or the Christian case. It is the same case. The mechanism does not change because the metaphysics change. The mechanism is about how human social groups produce certainty under apocalyptic pressure, and it operates the same way whether the apocalypse is the second coming of Christ, the dawn of the Restored Gospel, or the final battle for the soul of America. The people doing it do not experience themselves as manufacturing anything. The witnesses are sincere. The signers’ children will inherit that certainty as fact.

We can see this exact pattern in MAGA. We can see what happens when a cherished belief gets defended in a way that does not respond to evidence. We know how the in-group closes ranks when the leader’s reputation is threatened. Within the cult, the surviving testimony will be the believers’ testimony. We know all of this because we can see it happening all around us.

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The argument of this essay is that the analytical tools we developed to make sense of MAGA, and the analytical tools our tradition gave us to make sense of Mormonism, are the same tools that, turned inward, account for the religion we grew up in too. There is no special exemption for Christianity. The mechanism is the same. The preservation asymmetry is the same. The witness record means what it means in every other instance: it tells you what the believing community chose to remember.

What this essay is doing

I said this essay is structured persuasion, and I want to close by being precise about what that means.

I am not neutral. I think the religion I grew up in is built on a manufactured witness chain that has been refined by centuries of selective preservation into something that looks like evidence but isn’t. Pretending otherwise — writing as if I am conducting a dispassionate inquiry, as if both sides have equal purchase on the facts — would be a lie, and lies are what got us all into this mess in the first place.

The method I chose, leading with Mormonism, is itself an enactment of the essay’s argument. I am asking you to see a mechanism clearly on one target and then recognize it on another.

The testimony is the same testimony. The witnesses are the same witnesses. The preservation asymmetry is the same preservation asymmetry. The mechanism does not have a religion. It just produces them.

Edgar Rooke is the pseudonym for an old newsman when he writes outside his usual beat here on Medium, mostly about religion and politics. He lives in the northeast U.S. with his dog, Sam.

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