If you have spent more than five minutes defending your faith online, you have heard this one. “Your church CHANGES. Your leaders taught one thing and now they teach another. That’s hypocrisy, and it proves the whole thing is man-made.” Sometimes it comes from an evangelical, sometimes from an atheist. The wording changes, but the standard behind it never does, and it is a standard the critic almost NEVER applies to himself.

So here is the whole article in one sentence. If anyone held themselves, their beliefs, their scripture, and even the people THEY see as prophets (Moses, Peter, Paul) to the same standard they hold us, our beliefs, our prophets, and our scripture to…. it would ALL fall apart. So they should be careful. Jesus already told us how this works:

“For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” (Matthew 7:2, KJV)

Let’s take the critic’s measuring stick and use it on the Bible first.

God changes His commands in the Bible. A LOT.

If “the commandments changed” proves a church is false, start with Genesis. After the flood, God told Noah everything was on the menu:

“Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.” (Genesis 9:3, KJV)

Then, under Moses, God said the opposite about the pig:

“And the swine, though he divide the hoof, and be clovenfooted, yet he cheweth not the cud; he is unclean to you. Of their flesh shall ye not eat, and their carcase shall ye not touch; they are unclean to you.” (Leviticus 11:7-8, KJV)

Every moving thing, then NOT every moving thing. Was God a hypocrite? Of course not. He was giving a different people a different law for a different purpose. Paul said exactly that:

“Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster.” (Galatians 3:24-25, KJV)

Then Jesus came and openly changed how the law was taught, right to the crowd’s face:

“Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” (Matthew 5:38-39, KJV)

“Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;” (Matthew 5:43-44, KJV)

He even explained that one of Moses’ own rules was a concession, not the ideal:

“He saith unto them, Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so.” (Matthew 19:8, KJV)

And He said He came “not to destroy, but to fulfil” (Matthew 5:17, KJV). Fulfilled. Not frozen. The book of Hebrews says it flat out:

“For the priesthood being changed, there is made of necessity a change also of the law.” (Hebrews 7:12, KJV)

Read that again. A CHANGE ALSO OF THE LAW. That’s in the Bible the critic is holding.

Jesus even changed His own instructions to His own apostles. First it was “Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not” (Matthew 10:5, KJV). Later it was “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations” (Matthew 28:19, KJV). Same Lord, same apostles, different command, because it was a different time.

The apostles changed things too

Peter, the senior apostle, believed it was unlawful to even keep company with a Gentile. Then God showed him otherwise:

“And he said unto them, Ye know how that it is an unlawful thing for a man that is a Jew to keep company, or come unto one of another nation; but God hath shewed me that I should not call any man common or unclean.” (Acts 10:28, KJV)

Then the church held a council in Jerusalem, and circumcision, required since Abraham, was dropped for Gentile converts. Peter called it “a yoke upon the neck of the disciples, which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear” (Acts 15:10, KJV), and the letter that went out said:

“For it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things;” (Acts 15:28, KJV)

So imagine a first-century critic standing outside that meeting. “Your church CHANGES! For two thousand years God required circumcision, and now your apostles drop it? Hypocrites!” That is EXACTLY the argument people throw at us. Apply it evenly, and the book of Acts is a false church.

Even God “repents” in the Bible

The critic’s standard gets even more awkward here, because the Bible describes God Himself changing course. After Moses pleaded for Israel:

“And the LORD repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people.” (Exodus 32:14, KJV)

After Moses pleaded again in Numbers 14, “the LORD said, I have pardoned according to thy word” (Numbers 14:20, KJV). About Saul:

“It repenteth me that I have set up Saul to be king: for he is turned back from following me, and hath not performed my commandments.” (1 Samuel 15:11, KJV)

And about Nineveh:

“And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not.” (Jonah 3:10, KJV)

God announced destruction through His prophet, and it didn’t happen. If a Latter-day Saint prophet had said “destruction is coming” and then it didn’t come, the critic would call him a false prophet before lunch. Jonah would fail the critic’s test. In fact Jonah was ANGRY about it, because he knew God “repentest thee of the evil” (Jonah 4:2, KJV).

Prophets in the Bible made mistakes. We own that.

Here’s where the critic pivots. “Fine, but YOU claim prophets. So when your prophets get something wrong, that proves they’re false.”

That only works if we believe prophets are perfect, never have opinions, and can’t make mistakes. We have NEVER believed that. Joseph Smith recorded in February 1843 that a brother and sister from Michigan “thought that ‘a prophet is always a prophet;’ but I told them that a prophet was a prophet only when he was acting as such” (History of the Church 5:265). The founding prophet himself told people not to treat every word out of his mouth as revelation.

And that’s the BIBLE’S pattern. Nathan, a true prophet, gave David the green light on his own opinion, and God corrected him that same night:

“And Nathan said to the king, Go, do all that is in thine heart; for the LORD is with thee. And it came to pass that night, that the word of the LORD came unto Nathan, saying, Go and tell my servant David, Thus saith the LORD, Shalt thou build me an house for me to dwell in?” (2 Samuel 7:3-5, KJV)

Moses, the great lawgiver, disobeyed at Meribah and lost the promised land over it:

“And Moses lifted up his hand, and with his rod he smote the rock twice: and the water came out abundantly, and the congregation drank, and their beasts also. And the LORD spake unto Moses and Aaron, Because ye believed me not, to sanctify me in the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore ye shall not bring this congregation into the land which I have given them.” (Numbers 20:11-12, KJV)

Jonah got a direct call from God and ran the other way: “But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the LORD” (Jonah 1:3, KJV). Paul publicly confronted Peter, the chief apostle: “But when Peter was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed” (Galatians 2:11, KJV). Paul and Barnabas, two missionaries sent out by the Holy Ghost, couldn’t even agree on who to bring along:

“And the contention was so sharp between them, that they departed asunder one from the other: and so Barnabas took Mark, and sailed unto Cyprus;” (Acts 15:39, KJV)

Paul even labeled his own opinions as opinions: “But I speak this by permission, and not of commandment” (1 Corinthians 7:6, KJV), and “to the rest speak I, not the Lord” (1 Corinthians 7:12, KJV). And James tells us Elijah, the man who sealed the heavens, “was a man subject to like passions as we are” (James 5:17, KJV).

So here is the question for the critic. Do you hold Moses to the standard you hold Joseph Smith to? Do you hold Peter to the standard you hold Brigham Young to? Because if one mistake makes a false prophet, you just lost Moses, Jonah, Nathan, and Peter, and Paul and Barnabas can’t both be right. We own that prophets are human. Do you own it for YOURS?

Our early Saints got some things wrong. Of course they did.

The first Latter-day Saints were mostly converts from Protestant churches. They grew up with Protestant sermons and Protestant assumptions about God, the afterlife, and race, and then they received a restoration that came line upon line, “here a little, and there a little” (Isaiah 28:10, KJV). They made sense of new revelation with the mental furniture they already had. Some of it was wrong, and some things just hadn’t been revealed yet. Jesus told His own apostles, “I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now” (John 16:12, KJV), and Paul admitted, “we know in part, and we prophesy in part” (1 Corinthians 13:9, KJV).

Take race. The Church’s own Gospel Topics essay “Race and the Priesthood” says the idea that Black people descended from Cain and bore a curse “had been promulgated in the United States from at least the 1730s,” a century before the Church existed. WE ADOPTED IT FROM YOU. The essay also quotes Joseph Fielding Smith in 1907 admitting that a related belief was “not the official position of the Church, [and is] merely the opinion of men.” Today the Church “disavows the theories advanced in the past” and leaders “unequivocally condemn all racism, past and present, in any form.” That’s what it looks like to weigh old opinions against more revelation and set them aside. We don’t hide it. It’s published on the Church’s own website.

Now hold your own tradition to that standard. The Southern Baptist Convention, founded in 1845, said in its own 1995 resolution that its “relationship to African-Americans has been hindered from the beginning by the role that slavery played in the formation of the Southern Baptist Convention” and that “many of our Southern Baptist forbears defended the right to own slaves.” I respect them for saying it. But if a critic calls us hypocrites for changing, he has to explain why the same rule doesn’t apply to the people who taught it to us.

Your core doctrines came from committees

And this is where the critic’s standard really backfires. He says our PROPHETS change things. Where did his core doctrines come from?

The Council of Nicaea in 325 “was called by the emperor Constantine I, an unbaptized catechumen, who presided over the opening session and took part in the discussions,” according to Britannica. To define orthodoxy, the council “(with reluctance on the part of some) incorporated the nonscriptural word homoousios” into its creed. A NONSCRIPTURAL word, added with reluctance, by a meeting an unbaptized emperor called. And that creed said about the Holy Ghost only this: “And in the Holy Ghost.” That was it. By 381, the creed associated with the Council of Constantinople expanded that line into “the Lord and Giver of life, who proceedeth from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified, who spake by the prophets.” The creed most Christians recite today as “the Nicene Creed” is the REVISED one. Then in 451, the Council of Chalcedon, called by the emperor Marcian and attended by about 520 bishops or their representatives, approved both creeds and added its own confession about Christ’s two natures.

The canon itself? At the Council of Trent in 1546, the Catholic Church decreed under anathema that the deuterocanonical books are scripture, and Protestants rejected that judgment. Same Christianity, two different Bibles, settled by bodies of men disagreeing with each other.

Then the Westminster Assembly, “called by the English Long Parliament to reform the Church of England,” made up of 30 laymen from the House of Commons and the House of Lords, 121 English clergymen, and Scottish delegates, held 1,163 sessions between 1643 and 1649 and produced the Westminster Confession and catechisms. Parliament called it. Members of Parliament sat in it. Committees of divines debated it.

None of those bodies claimed to be prophets receiving revelation. So when the critic says “your prophets changed things,” my answer is simple. At least ours CLAIM to talk to God. Yours took a vote. Which one should be more careful about the word “man-made”?

And this isn’t a small fringe. The Center for the Study of Global Christianity estimates 47,000 Christian denominations worldwide as of 2024, counting each organized church body separately in each country. Every one of them exists because somebody concluded what came before needed to change.

The modern Pharisees

Jesus dealt with this exact attitude. The Pharisees attacked Him for not following THEIR traditions, not God’s commandments. “Behold, why do they on the sabbath day that which is not lawful?” (Mark 2:24, KJV). His answer: “The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath” (Mark 2:27, KJV). And He nailed the real problem:

“For laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the tradition of men, as the washing of pots and cups: and many other such like things ye do.” (Mark 7:8, KJV)

They also had a double standard problem:

“For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers.” (Matthew 23:4, KJV)

That is the critic who demands that our prophets never err while his own prophets, councils, and pastors get a pass. That’s a heavy burden for us, with not one finger lifted for himself. Jesus’ instruction was clear: “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye” (Matthew 7:5, KJV), and “Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgment” (John 7:24, KJV).

Name the fallacies

The first one is the strawman. The critic invents a belief we don’t hold, “Latter-day Saints think prophets are infallible and every word is doctrine,” and knocks it down. Joseph Smith rejected that in 1843. If you refute a belief we don’t hold, you haven’t refuted us. You’ve refuted your own conclusion about us.

The second is the double standard, or special pleading, which means applying a rule to someone else and quietly exempting yourself. “Change proves a church is false” gets applied to us, but not to Genesis 9 and Leviticus 11, not to Acts 15, not to Nicaea, not to Trent. “A prophet who errs is a false prophet” gets applied to Joseph Smith, but not to Nathan, Moses, Jonah, or Peter. Same rule, different verdict, depending on who’s on trial. So justify it. Where does your test come from, and why does it only point one direction?

The atheist version

The atheist says, “At least I follow the evidence, and evidence doesn’t change its mind.” Except it does, and that’s the point of science. In 2006 the International Astronomical Union adopted Resolution B5, defining a planet, and Resolution B6, which says “Pluto is a ‘dwarf planet’ by the above definition.” Nobody concluded astronomy was a fraud.

Science has had its ugly chapters too. The Penn Museum says Samuel Morton’s 19th-century skull research “was used to justify racism and white supremacist views,” and that it is “often centered in contemporary histories of scientific racism.” Later studies of that same collection supported “evidence that there is more variation within groups than between them.” Science taught something wrong and corrected it. Does that make science false? No. It means scientists are human and revise with better information. That’s the HUMAN standard, with God or without Him, with a prophet or without one. If it’s a virtue when your side does it and hypocrisy when we do it, you aren’t following the evidence. You’re following your preference.

With what measure ye mete

So here’s where it lands. Hold the Bible to the critic’s standard, and God’s commands changed, God “repented,” and the apostles dropped circumcision. Hold Bible prophets to it, and Moses, Nathan, Jonah, Peter, and Paul all fail. Hold the creeds to it, and you get emperors, reluctant votes on nonscriptural words, and committees appointed by Parliament. Hold science to it, and you lose Pluto and a pile of 19th-century textbooks.

It ALL falls apart. Every bit of it.

We don’t need it to fall apart, because we never claimed our prophets were perfect. We OWN our history. We believe God speaks to imperfect men, reveals truth line upon line, and corrects us as we go, just like He did in the Bible. The question was never whether we change. The question is whether you’re willing to live by the measure you’re using on us.

Because Jesus already settled who gets measured by it:

“Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” (Matthew 7:1-2, KJV)

So be careful with that measuring stick. It’s pointed at you too.

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