He whose name shall not be mentioned

More than a week after October 2020 General Conference, Jonathan Neville has finally gotten around to acknowledging the matter of Elder Gerrit W. Gong’s comment in the Saturday afternoon session regarding “Mary Whitmer, the faithful sister to whom Moroni showed the Book of Mormon plates.”

I use the term acknowledging because Neville barely mentions it at all; instead, he brushes past it without dealing with any of its implications. His comments are limited to a mere 58 words in a 2,683-word blog post. (That’s a mere 2.2% by word count.)

The issue has resurfaced because in the October 2020 General Conference, one of the speakers repeated the story, citing Saints as authority. (I won’t mention the speaker’s name out of respect.)

Right in the same talk, the speaker described Moroni as “as a glorious messenger from God,” which is consistent with the description of Moroni in Letter IV.

Notice how Neville didn’t mention either the speaker’s name nor the office he holds; he didn’t even mention if the speaker was male or female. One could get the impression from his post that it was a newly-called Seventy or a counselor in an auxiliary presidency who made the offending remark. But the speaker was an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ, one of fifteen men Neville supposedly sustains as a prophet, seer, and revelator.

“It is proposed that we sustain one of the speakers, whose name we won’t mention.”

By avoiding using Elder Gong’s name or mentioning his priesthood office, Neville less-than-deftly sidesteps all of the serious implications of his dogmatic insistence that the personage who appeared to Mary Whitmer was Nephi. For someone who insists that his ideological opponents teach that “the prophets were wrong,” Neville is awkwardly unwilling to admit that of himself. Instead, he just moves right along in his blog post to yet another rambling diatribe about the “M2C”* conspiracy, his assertion that Latter-day Saint scholars are denying what Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery taught, etc., without explicitly implicating Elder Gong in those heresies but clearly leaving the reader to infer exactly that.

This is yet more evidence that Jonathan Neville, like his Heartlander comrades, clings to the selected teachings of dead prophets while rejecting the teachings of living prophets. Again and again this blog has demonstrated that Neville’s teachings are not in harmony with those of President Russell M. Nelson (1, 2, 3), President M. Russell Ballard (4), Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf (5), Elder Quinten L. Cook (6), Elder LeGrand R. Curtis Jr. (7), and now Elder Gerrit W. Gong. He’s implied that Church leaders are withholding vital truths from Church members. He’s implied that the Brethren are ignorant of lies that are being fed to them by Church employees.

If this isn’t clear evidence that he’s on the road to apostasy, then I don’t know what is.

—Peter Pan

* “M2C” is Jonathan Neville’s acronym for the theory that the Book of Mormon took place in Mesoamerica and that the hill Cumorah in the Book of Mormon is not the same hill in New York where Joseph Smith received the plates of Mormon.