One of The Fourteen Fundamentals in Following the Prophet (#4, to be precise) is “The prophet will never lead the Church astray.“
President Wilford Woodruff stated:
“I say to Israel, the Lord will never permit me or any other man who stands as president of the Church to lead you astray. It is not in the program. It is not in the mind of God.” (The Discourses of Wilford Woodruff, pp. 212–13.)
President Marion G. Romney tells of this incident which happened to him:
“I remember years ago when I was a bishop I had President Heber J. Grant talk to our ward. After the meeting I drove him home … Standing by me, he put his arm over my shoulder and said: ‘My boy, you always keep your eye on the President of the Church and if he ever tells you to do anything, and it is wrong, and you do it, the Lord will bless you for it.’ Then with a twinkle in his eye, he said, ‘But you don’t need to worry. The Lord will never let his mouthpiece lead the people astray.’” (Conference Report, October 1960, p. 78.)
I’m sure this is very comforting to the rank-and-file LDS Mormon, since I’ve had many of them quote the statement to me, as if it is a rebuttal to my pointing out some issue with the past or present LDS leaders. However, when you start looking deeper into it all, problems emerge and become apparent.
For starters, what would qualify as an LDS prophet leading the church astray? Whenever I’ve asked LDSs that, I’ve gotten no answer. Generally, the response (if they don’t just ignore the question entirely) is something along the lines of “it can’t happen”. In other words, they can come up with no example of what it would look like for the LDS prophet to lead the LDS Church astray. This is actually circular reasoning and is shown by this graphic:
Sometimes they try to give an example, but it’s either so vaguely worded that it’s hard to figure out what it would look like in the real world, or they say it would be something like, “if the LDS prophet taught false doctrine”.
I always pounce on this latter answer, because there are numerous points of doctrine that past LDS Prophets have taught that are now no longer taught by the LDS Church or are even actively disavowed as being untrue (the most prominent are three taught by Brigham Young: the Adam-God Theory, the Black Priesthood Ban, and Blood Atonement).
At this point, the LDS furiously begins backpedaling and says that that wasn’t “doctrine” but just “policy” or “opinion”. I then point out that these “opinions” guided and were believed by the LDS Church for decades (in the case of the BPB, it was from 1852 – 1978!). If that sort of thing was not “leading the church astray” — if the LDS Church could withhold the priesthood and Temple ceremonies from blacks for over 125 years, and actively teach that it was because they were “less valiant in the pre-mortal existence” and that their skin color was due to “the curse of Cain” — what could possibly qualify?
So we see that this also becomes circular reasoning — “The BPB wasn’t ‘leading the church astray’ because the Prophet can’t do that, so whatever it was, it wasn’t ‘leading the church astray’.”
TOYBOM: The One Year Book of Mormon 
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