The CES Letter presents early Church polygamy as if it were a single, simple practice driven by secret sexual motives. It compresses decades of events, changing laws, personal struggles, and incomplete records into a flat narrative meant to provoke moral outrage. By doing so, it removes historical context and replaces it with assumption, encouraging readers to judge the past by modern expectations without first understanding what actually happened.
Claims about secrecy, coercion, and polyandry are treated as settled facts, while ignoring the actual historical record. Statements are repeated without showing how they are established, what sources they rely on, or where uncertainty remains. At the same time, the CES Letter ignores extensive evidence of resistance within Church leadership itself. Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and others expressed opposition, discomfort, and reluctance toward a practice that ran directly against their culture, instincts, and public standing. That resistance is documented, yet it is largely absent from the Letter’s framing.
The CES Letter also collapses all sealings into sexual marriages, which misrepresents what Joseph Smith believed he was doing. He believed that sealing was an eternal binding, not always a marital relationship in the present life. Nearly all of his sealings were not marriages in the conventional sense and did not involve sexual relationships. They were understood as connections for eternity. If one does not believe in eternity, those sealings have no practical effect at all. Treating them as secret affairs rather than religious acts only works by ignoring what Joseph actually claimed and believed.