[Apologetics is] necessary as long as investigators are asking missionaries questions. It’s necessary as long as cynical fourteen-year-olds are testing their seminary teachers. And it’s necessary as long as the membership of the Church has access to Google… We don’t have the choice of making apologetics go away. We only have the choice of doing what we can to improve the enterprise. –Julie M. Smith, Panel Discussion on “Faith, Reason, and the Critical Study of Mormon Apologetics”[1]
Hawkgrrrl’s post on Neo-Apologists got me thinking about recent developments in the field of Mormon apologetics. The last few years have brought about many changes, and it appears we continue to be in the midst of major shifts. Over at Times & Seasons, Dave Banack reported on the creation of a page at LDS.org listing external apologetic resources for seminary teachers. At the Mormonity blog, Jeff Lindsay wrote about Elder Holland’s pro-apologetics address at an August 16th conference celebrating John Welch’s discovery of chiasmus in the Book of Mormon. And at By Common Consent, Kevin Barney discussed the fascinating August 3rd roundtable discussion on the recent Kofford Books publication, LDS Perspectives in Theology: Apologetics, a collection of essays covering a variety of apologetic approaches and concerns. All of these tie into two larger movements in the field: (1) increased recognition of the importance of different apologetic styles, and (2) the institutional church openly supporting and facilitating access to apologetic resources for churchmembers.
Background: FARMS, the Maxwell Institute, and the rise of The Interpreter Foundation
The Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS), established in 1979 by John W. Welch, has long been iconic of Mormon apologetics. FARMS and it’s “patron saint,” Hugh Nibley, were veritable powerhouses. In 1997, FARMS officially joined BYU with President Hinckley remarking, “[FARMS] has grown to provide strong support and defense of the Church on a professional basis.” Officially, FARMS was “a research and publication center that focus[ed] on scholarly analysis of the Book of Mormon, the Book of Abraham, the Old Testament, the New Testament, early Christian history, and ancient temples.” It’s logical, then, why BYU placed FARMS with two existing ancient religious text preservation projects (CPART and METI) under the umbrella of a new Institute for the Study and Preservation of Ancient Religious Texts (ISPART). In 2006 ISPART was renamed the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. As FARMS became nested in increasingly academic/scholarly ventures, some began to feel uncomfortable with vestiges of contentious apologetics, especially visible in the Mormon Studies Review (formerly FARMS Review). Eventually it all came to a head in 2012.
In May of that year, Dr. Daniel C. Peterson, editor of the Mormon Studies Review, Maxwell Institute Director of Outreach, and editor-in-chief of METI, was called into a three-hour meeting with the director of the Maxwell Institute. He was informed that the institute (and, by extension, the Mormon Studies Review) was to pursue a more academic approach to Mormon studies. Peterson, editor of the Review from it’s inception as Review of the Books on the Book of Mormon in 1989, expressed deep misgivings.
I responded that if he intended by that to abandon the Institute’s long-standing commitment to commending and defending the faith, to turn away from its goal of serving a non-specialist Latter-day Saint audience as well as scholars, I would be unable to support him in that change.
Peterson felt that reducing the audience to merely scholars would turn the institute and Review into an “anodyne and elitist project of little relevance to ordinary members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Peterson was proud of the fact that the Review was the institute’s publication “most overtly willing to confront critics, most prone to engaging in controversy or polemics or overt apologetics.” He considered it a feature, not a bug, that the journal had an irreverent and sometimes biting sense of humor,
The Review has always had an impish sense of humor and a penchant for irony and satire. This has offended some who have, I’m convinced, quite misunderstood what was going on. But it has entertained many, and, personally, I’ll choose dry wit over dry tedium any day of the week.
Unable to support the “new course” the director planned for the institute and the Review, Peterson resigned his decades-old position of editor of the Review and as MI Director of Outreach in June 2012. The next year he resigned as editor-in-chief of METI. Peterson’s departure from the Maxwell Institute and the apparent abandonment of apologetics by that organization sent shockwaves across the Mormon apologetic community. Many were deeply concerned and, like Peterson, felt it was a betrayal of all FARMS stood for. How could the Maxwell Institute and, by extension, the Church’s flagship university abandon apologetics?
Immediately after his abrupt departure from the Institute, Peterson began receiving communications “from people who had been closely associated with FARMS and who believed the torch FARMS had carried since its founding in California in 1979 needed to be picked up, now that it had been dropped, by a new organization.” Accordingly, in late July 2012, Peterson met with seven other Mormon scholars and apologists over lunch. There, at a Provo restaurant, The Interpreter Foundation was born.
A month later, in August 2012, Peterson introduced the fledgling organization in a FairMormon conference address. He said,
…I’m convinced that apologetics is an important part of scholarly discourse in religious studies, that it should be considered a kind of religious studies, and, therefore, of Mormon studies.
Accordingly, I’m delighted to announce the launch of a new venture in Mormon studies, Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture—the product of a team that came together only a few days back, after my return from overseas less than two weeks ago….
It will not be purely an apologetic journal, but it won’t exclude or disdain apologetics, either.
Did the Maxwell Institute Abandon Apologetics?
It depends on the definition, and this is key. At the time of the split, some people considered the academic field of Mormon studies wholly separate from faithful apologetic endeavors. Peterson argued they shouldn’t be divided, that apologetics was a legitimate scholarly subset of Mormon studies. But what if it was the other way around? What if participation in Mormon studies itself was apologetics?
As Blair Hodges argued years later, the Maxwell Institute didn’t abandon it’s defense of the faith.
Rather than asking whether apologetics could or should be done here, the Institute has been asking all along: what kind of apologetics shall we do?
Although the Mormon Studies Review was no longer the place for “explicit testimony bearing,” Hodges argued the Institute’s commitment to academic ideals “commends and defends the faith and kingdom in a wider sense by manifesting core LDS values…” These include acquiring knowledge by study and faith, showing by example that “faithful believers can engage in the rigors of the academy without diminishing faith in the gospel…,” and charity. Especially charity.
We acknowledge the rich LDS history of vigorous defenses, sometimes witty, snarky, or even contentious, from the days of Joseph Smith to the present, and we expect to see it continue. At the same time, crafting a mission statement and institutional perspective always requires selection….
If smashmouth apologetics has a place, it isn’t at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute. We want civility and gentleness to infuse all of the work we produce for Latter-day Saints, as well as the scholarship we produce for the benefit of the wider academy and other religious traditions.
Apologetic Approaches
In the wake of the 2012 turmoil, Kevin Barney was asked his thoughts about apologetics and offered a helpful paradigm of thinking about the field. He proposed that apologetics operated in “three different spheres.”
- Engagement apologetics: “…[W]hen you engage directly with the critic. That’s like debate, the aggressive style people think of. Rhetorical combat in the octagon; two people enter, one leaves, that kind of mentality. Today a lot of that takes place on message boards…”
- Scholarly apologetics: “Scholarly apologetics is applying the tools of scholarship assuming Mormon faith claims. It involves things like peer review and cite checking and footnotes and linguistic tools and dead tree publication… [N]ot directly engaging anyone but providing a scholarly apparatus around Mormon faith claims.”
- Educative apologetics: “FAIR’s mission became one of educative apologetics. Its focus is inward, on members of the Church…. People come to these things with fundamentalist, black and white thinking, very presentist, so sometimes you just need to inculcate a little historical consciousness in them.”
These categories help clarify what happened with Dan Peterson and the Maxwell Institute. It was a conflict of engagement apologetics versus scholarly apologetics. Dan Peterson felt the Maxwell Institute was obligated by it’s FARMS heritage to offer a sometimes contentious engagement approach, but leadership at the Maxwell Institute felt that detracted from the academic goals of the organization. The Interpreter Foundation then took up the mantle of offering a journal where scholarly, educative, and engagement approaches could be presented to a non-academic audience.
In the last few years, however, it has become clear that apologetics operates in a fourth sphere as well, a pastoral sphere. In the 2016 FairMormon conference, Grant Hardy presented these 4 categories in terms of conversation partners.
- Conversations with Academics asking, “What do you believe and why?”
- Conversations with Critics asking, “How can you believe that?”
- Conversations with Faithful Members asking, “Aren’t our beliefs great?”
- Conversations with Wavering Mormons asking, “What can I believe?” or “Can I believe?”
In Hardy’s conversations with wavering Mormons, or pastoral apologetics, matters of intellect alone are not sufficient. Joey Stuart, a Maxwell Institute Nibley Fellow, gave an apt description of this approach earlier this year,
My academic knowledge only mattered in this conversation as much as I was also willing to share my own spiritual experiences, providing both intellectual and devotional frameworks in which others can reconcile faith and knowledge. My expertise only mattered so far as I was willing to speak to my relationship with God and the Church—to be as vulnerable as the person asking me questions. I had to learn to speak about experiences where I had felt the Holy Ghost. I learned that I needed to provide an example of how someone comes to grips with difficult truths and decides to remain planted in the gospel.
While practitioners of different apologetic approaches in the past may have been at odds with each other, the last few months have shown an increased tolerance in the field. I first saw it in the wake of Duane Boyce’s infamous 3-part Interpreter article attacking fellow apologists Terryl Givens, Patrick Mason, and Grant Hardy. I obviously wasn’t wild about Boyce’s work, but it was refreshing to see notable apologists with differing backgrounds in the field, like Jeff Lindsay and David Bokovy, step up to defend Givens, Mason, and Hardy.
Also important was the roundtable discussion with the release of the Kofford Books publication, Perspectives on Mormon Theology: Apologetics.[2] What I appreciated was seeing Stephen Smoot, a self-avowed Dan Peterson protégé, offer his admiration of David Bokovy’s pastoral apologetic approach. And then there was Amanda Brown reflecting on Juliann Reynolds’ essay about female involvement in apologetics. Apologetics isn’t just publishing in Interpreter or presenting at FairMormon conferences, Brown said. Defending the faith can be as simple as social media posts and everyday interactions among colleagues.
Facilitating Churchmember Access to Apologetic Resources
In the last decade, the institutional church has become more overt in supporting apologetic endeavors. On August 16th, a very public display of institutional approval occurred at a celebration to honor John W. Welch and the 50th anniversary of his discovery of chiasmus in the Book of Mormon. Elder Jeffrey R. Holland spoke at the event, and conveyed the Brethren’s appreciation for the honoree as well as the “legion of other men and women across the Church who are putting their shoulders to the wheel of reasoned, determined, persuasive gospel scholarship.” In his closing statement, Elder Holland asked for a blessing on “an ever-larger cadre of young scholars around the Church to do more and more to discover and delineate and declare the reasons for the hope that is in us…”
The Church’s increasing involvement in apologetics over the last ten years was in fits and starts. First there was an emphasis on scholarly apologetics with the Church History Department producing materials intended to meet the highest academic standards (e.g., Joseph Smith Papers project). Then, in the wake of Bottgate and the Swedish Rescue, the Church entered the educative apologetic sphere by commissioning scholars to create the Gospel Topics essays, published from 2013 to 2015. An “inoculative” strategy was adopted to combat growing disaffection among youth, and church curriculum began incorporating information from the Gospel Topics essays, first at the institute level (2015), then with Doctrinal Mastery at the seminary level (2016).
Last July, the Church published an online resource for seminary teachers in it’s Doctrinal Mastery section, a list of links to “Gospel Topics, Essays, and Other Resources.” Among the more than two dozen links are various apologetic organizations, including the Maxwell Institute, FairMormon, and The Interpreter Foundation. Although some may quibble about what made the list, it serves a need. As Blair Van Dyke pointed out in the August 3rd roundtable discussion, Elder Ballard gave a mandate to CES Instructors to seek after the “best books,” specifying this referred to scriptures, teachings of current church leaders, and the “best LDS scholarship available.” Van Dyke explained that CES instructors deal with a lot of ambiguity with this charge, “What are those best books? I do not see that type of a compilation of literature being formulated. Maybe this should be an individual thing, great, but most people need a jumpstart.”[3] As it’s unreasonable to expect seminary instructors to spend a fortune on a required reading list, the online option provides that type of jumpstart for instructors worldwide to access current LDS scholarship.
But it’s shortsighted to believe that a list of apologetic resources will only be accessed by seminary teachers. Acquiring spiritual knowledge is a foundational principle of the Doctrinal Mastery program, and closely tied with that is teaching students how to help friends who come to them with tough questions. Although the curriculum emphasizes students first consulting “divinely appointed sources,” it also notes helpful knowledge can be accessed from other trustworthy, reliable resources. It would be easy for anyone to assume the resources on this list are those the Church deems most trustworthy and reliable.
Conclusion
The field of Mormon apologetics continues to evolve. There are more legitimate ways for churchmembers to “defend the faith” than ever before. At the same time, the Church is doubling down on getting apologetic materials into the hands of CES Instructors and, by extension, their students. Will this create any noticeable effect among the membership at large? After all, as Julie Smith noted, “We can’t all be apologetic experts and expect the shifts at the cannery to be covered.”[4]
Discuss.
[1] 2015 UVU apologetics roundtable [39:44]
[2] I just began reading the book, so I can’t give my thoughts directly on that.
[3] Kofford Books apologetics roundtable [1:15:07]
[4] 2015 UVU apologetics roundtable [1:44:43]
Wheat & Tares 
That was very interesting.
Agreed, that was a thorough, interesting post
I would really like to see church leaders embrace the pastoral apologetic by vulnerably and honestly discussing how they, personally, deal with these troubling issues; and I’m talking about leaders from the Q15 on down. I hope they don’t cede the field to apologists because it would be great to have a variety of perspectives.
Cody, I think the brethren would prefer pastoral apologetics be a more one-on-one thing, but there is something close to it on the church history page. When you go to the Race and Priesthood gospel topics essay page, one of the related links is a 4-part personal essay by Ahman Corbett who, at the time, was a mission president. Although he isn’t a GA, the presence on lds.org lends weight to his viewpoint. He mentions specific problems throughout the essay, not just the ban itself but also the racism in the BofM. Link to part 1: https://history.lds.org/article/personal-essay-on-race-and-the-priesthood?lang=eng
I like grant hardy’s approach, and is the approach i am trying to take .
God help our poor seminary and institute teachers, few of whom are trained academics and most of whom have other day jobs out here in the ‘missionary field’ .
I personally don’t know how to begin to navigate my way through this, or my young people.
I think most people, most of the time fall back on ‘testimony talk’ – either ‘rely on mine’ – or on ‘obedience talk’ – be obedient and your testimony will come. To be apologetic, time was when that really was enough, but evidence based information has become very much the order of the day for the tertiary educated.
I really fear that we are in danger of losing all our questioning young people, because we are not engaging with their questions in any substantive way. Neither they nor their teachers have time to search out all the academic stuff when there are so many other demands.
Ours is an educated ward and no-one engages at this level. Maybe we just have to trust God to do His own work and call these kids when life has brought them to their knees.
MaryAnn, a great post. Well thought out, well written and very engaging. Such a welcome break from so many posts that are just diatribes against the church and a recitation of hurts and personal problems. I have a close friend who teaches at an Institute at a large western university. He has a Ph.d.in Religious studies and has become the person who all the instructors send their “problem” students to. He has helped hundreds of students, but does so at a professional risk to himself. Periodically he is called on the carpet because some bishop or stake president doesn’t like his honest approach and willingness to deal with the students in an honest way. Recently he was forced to sign a letter that was placed in his file saying we would not “rock the boat so much” in the future He tells me that single biggest problem in dealing with thorny church issues are the overwhelming majority of ignorant and frightened seminary and institute teachers. They don’t care if the resources are provided by the church, in most cases they simply ignore the new material and forge ahead they way they always have been. It is kind of frustrating.
I like the fact that LDS apologetics is becoming more diverse and that the scholarship is becoming more rigorous. It does not have to be an all one way approach. I like what Brian Stubbs is doing on the linguistic front and the work that Stanford Carmack is doing with the serendipitous find of Early Modern English in the Book of Mormon. However, those avenues of scholarship will mainly work with other scholars as most LDS defenders of the faith nor critics are versed well enough in the different disciplines to do more than follow the logic of the information being presented but cannot confirm or refute the details.
I really like Dan Peterson’s approach also. Scholarship plus a bit of humor. Often self deprecating.
Apologetics will never “save the day” for LDS theology. Only the Holy Ghost can do that. It will not and should not be something that will cause a person to believe that the Church is true, nor should critical information be something that should, by itself, cause a person to decide that it is not true. Good apologetics should provide a counter point to the critics, giving a person with questions, be it a long time member, a youthful member, or an investigator solid resources to look for answers.
Apologetics will never sway a critic bent on find looking for chinks, contradictions, reasons to disbelieve, or whatever. It will help someone that has sincere questions and is willing to look at all of the evidence.
It seems to me though that the biggest problem that the church has is not the brand of apologetics that might be employed in one case or another, but the internal strife that I witness in discussion groups and in blogs across the internet.
Glenn
Excellent, as always, Mary Ann. And I agree with your fourth added category of pastoral apologetics. That is a very important recent development.
A week ago yesterday I subbed for the GD lesson on D&C Sections 131 and 132. I spent the first part of the class on 131, and then turned the remainder of the class into Polygamy 101. My rationale was as follows: I realize the Church hates talking about polygamy and wishes it would all just go away. But that’s a vain hope. What is the number one thing people around the world know about the Church? Polygamy. A century hasn’t changed that, and if in the year 2525 we are still alive that will still be true.. If we were the Amish (who do not do missionary work or actively seek converts), we could ignore that element of our past. But we’re not Amish, we’re Mormons, the most missionary oriented Christian sect this side of the JWs. If people in good faith and from a sense of curiosity ask us about polygamy, can we really just bail on the conversation because it’s uncomfortable to us? We need to be able to talk meaningfully about it.
None of us is going to be an expert on this subject, but we should at least know the very basics. So we went through about a dozen basic questions on the subject. The first one was “Did Joseph Smith teach and practice polygamy?” The answer to which was yes, during the course of his life he married approximately 34 additional wives and taught the principle to about 2-300 others by the time of his death. (I said that if nothing else I didn’t want anyone to leave that room thinking Brigham Young had started polygamy, which is a very common misconception among active Mormons.)
I would say the lesson went well, although I admittedly hit a bit of a snag when we got to polyandry (I didn’t use the technical term, but we described the practice.) People were incredulous at that one (and of course I couldn’t blame them). Yesterday I was relieved to see that everyone came back, no one was thrown too far off of her horse. This is why I’m an advocate of the concept of inoculation. It was at times a challenging discussion, but now that they’ve had it they are protected from being exposed to the history from a hostile source. They’re not experts, but they now know the basics, including even some of the most challenging aspects of the practice. I believe it’s better to teach these things in a secure, faithful setting, rather than risking first exposure coming from a hostile source.
And really, we should be teaching these kinds of lessons to our youth. They are BORED TO TEARS by the lessons they are getting now, especially since the Come Follow Me curriculum dictates an entire month on the same topic. They could handle lessons about these things. It’s not like you can protect them from people asking them about polygamy (a common taunt is for other kids to ask “How many moms do you have?” Leaving them in ignorance is not the best approach, in my view; knowledge is power.)
Kevin — excellent points, both as to the terrible boredom some experience and the need to truly teach.
I enjoyed the thoughtful post, thank you. I also agree with Kevin Barney that the Come Follow Me lessons are boring for the youth and boring to teach. I don’t really use it much when teaching the young men. People will probably disagree with me, but I think thorny issues lead to conclusions that require us to cede ground that we are not ready to cede. The BOM is a classic example. Scholars like Richard Bushman agree that there is much in the BOM that is from the 19th Century, King James language and mistakes, phrases from literature at that time, etc. This does not inevitably lead to the conclusion that it is not scripture or not inspired, but requires reevaluation of how Joseph translated and the definition of scripture and historicity. Is there a gospel topics essay on this? No. There is a gospel topics essay on DNA in the BOM. What it does is get highly technical. I believe that is by design, so that 90% of the readers will get about half way through, give up and walk away with the conclusion: “wow, this is highly technical and complex and I’m not sure I can wrap my head around it and will move on to something else.” This is the tactic of the Dan Peterson school of apologetics. Have you read his response to Letter to a CES Director? It takes an incredulous tone, nit-pics logical fallacies, etc., but does not address the issues head on and is not willing to cede ground or acknowledge areas of truth the critic presents. It’s similar to Hugh Nibley’s “No Ma’am That’s Not History.” With more access to information and better educated Church members, those tactics are no longer working. I hope that we don’t go back to that as a solution to combat the current faith crisis. I believe the only viable long-term solution is ceding some ground, re framing our paradigm and teaching youth and young adults the true history and a nuanced view in Seminary and Institute. This is scary and requires us to give up some sacred cows. Until we’re ready to do this, we’re going to keep doing what we’ve done and keep getting what we’ve got.
Thank-you for the comments, everyone.
Kevin, I’m glad your GD class went well. I was in one four years ago where it didn’t go well. The teacher opted to spend a few minutes on polygamy at the end of class, opening it up to class thoughts without any sort of framing. It was uncomfortable, so an older guy decided to lighten the mood with a sexist joke (but it was okay, because his friend told it to him in the temple!). I typically really like GD class, but I hated that day and honestly had to fight myself to walk back into the room the next week. I think it takes a very well prepared, talented teacher to pull off such a delicate subject. Opening it up to the randomness that can occur in a SS class can backfire horribly, as I discovered. It reminds me of a concept I saw frequently in preparation for this post, sometimes bad apologetics can do more damage than no apologetics.
Felix, “It takes an incredulous tone, nit-pics logical fallacies, etc., but does not address the issues head on and is not willing to cede ground or acknowledge areas of truth the critic presents.” I admit this has been my frustration as well with some of the classic engagement apologetics. Hardy made a good point that often with critics we tend to overstate our case since we are coming from a defensive position, but when we talk with members it’s important not to fall into that same trap. We need to help people see some of the shades of gray rather than just going along with the “everything is great!” party line. Julie Smith made a really good point in the 2015 UVU roundtable about how sometimes scholarly apologetics is seen as ceding ground when it supports views contrary to what the church has traditionally taught (she used the example of the story of Zacharias often attributed to Joseph Smith, yet likely was apocryphal and not revelatory). Ultimately she argued that if *we* can recognize mistakes and seek to correct them proactively, we are ultimately on stronger footing with future generations. It looks like ceding ground initially, but if that ground was unstable to begin with, we are in better shape without it.
I loved your post Mary Ann. I like things that make me think. I doubt many people will read this, but let me talk a little about polygamy and how apologists have dealt with it in my lifetime. My first exposure to polygamy was in seminary. I was told that early church members practiced polygamy because God told them to. I was also taught that it is obviously okay with God because it is in the Bible and that the women that were taken as polygamist wives in this dispensation were women who could not find a husband and needed one to be sealed to in order to make it to the CK. The fat and ugly ones. Sorry to say that, I know it sounds terrible, but that is the way it was framed to me. One seminary teacher told me that Brigham was asked why he married such plain women and he responded that he could see how beautiful they would become after the resurrection. It is kind of like a Mormon version of Shallow Hal. To my teenage mind, this all made perfect sense. I got home from my mission in 2002 and I was a BRM and JFS worshipping Mormon. Occasionally my head would glitch at church like Alfred in that Jennifer Lawernce and Chris Pratt space travel movie. Pratt is sitting in front of Alfred the robot asking him what to do if his hibernation pod fails. Pay attention if you ever watch this movie and you will know what I am talking about.
Things started to unravel for me a bit in 2013 when I first read the essay on blacks and the priesthood. The disavowal of past doctrine taught by prophets was very hard for me. The first thing my mind went to was Polygamy because deep down I have always hated it. The apologists defenses melted like butter held by a celestial person living on the sun. I was completely unaware of how God interacts with prophets. Bishops, Stake Presidents, Seminary teachers, parents, Mission Presidents had all testified to me that they knew we were being led by a prophet that walks and talks with Jesus on a daily basis. Turns out that is not how revelation is received. Learning of Joseph’s methods of translation, how the D&C was received and compiled, and the hands off approach, anti-micro managing style God takes with his prophets opened up the possibility that Polygamy was completely man made. The defense that it was in the Bible falls the same way. Abraham, Jacob, David all receive revelation the same way that Joseph did. The idea that there were too many women and not enough men, so the men were doing the whole thing as a service project defense goes away with all the teenage bride stories.
There is one other ugly thing about polygamy. It is how closely it is tied to the dearest doctrine we have. We have become the Church of the Eternal Family. It is the main focus of all our meetings. It is way more important to us than Jesus. The problem is that we have no idea why a man and woman need to be sealed together to receive exaltation. Joseph taught very plainly that spirits cannot be created or destroyed. They are co eternal with God. Go read the King Follet discourse. Brigham Young took polygamy in another direction. He taught that spirits could be created and destroyed (JD 2:124, 1:275-276, 4:32) From him we get this idea that members have now that we will be having spirit babies in heaven. The more wives you have, the easier it will be to populate your own worlds. (I do not understand how God can organize the spirit of a cow, dog, cat, mouse, tree, etc.. and somehow can not organize the spirit of humans without having an opposite sex co creator.) It turns out that you can either agree with Brigham or you can agree with Joseph. If the church were ever to disavow polygamy, and I don’t think they will, it would undermine this whole idea and purpose of eternal families that members have created in their minds. I would love for the church leaders to come out and speak directly about it. The closest thing I can think of them talking about it was Elder Andersen testifying that he knows Joseph Smith to be a virtuous man.
So what is the best apologists line for Polygamy today? I honestly cannot think of one. Who can even try and defend that awful practice? If not to make spirit babies, what is it’s purpose in the eternities? Is God a polygamist? What do I tell my kids about polygamy? To get to my point, if you want to be a good apologist today in the church you need to learn how to say WE JUST DON’T KNOW. This is where I see Mason and Givens taking it. Not on just this one issue either. They just want to focus on the good the church can do in your life. Boyce and others like him are doing there best to keep Mormonism unique by defending doctrines that separate us from mainstream Christianity. I can see why they are doing this because if you water Mormonism down with too many “we just don’t knows” what do you have left?
Mary Ann, I see at least three problems in how that teacher approached it. First, one cannot try to deal with that subject in a few minutes at the end of class; it’s simply too big. Second, there is an historical state of the art to what we know about it, and a teacher has to be prepared by learning the basics at least of that state of the art. And third, one can’t just toss this issue to the class the way our GD teachers often do, because the class doesn’t know anything and is just going to repeat traditional talking points that they grew up with. If a teacher is going to go there, she needs to take greater control of the presentation.
Zach, “It turns out that you can either agree with Brigham or you can agree with Joseph.” The church has gone with option C where you have eternal intelligences (Joseph) inserted into spirit bodies created by resurrected beings (Brigham). Where possible, the church prefers “and” over “or.” 🙂 The church has explicitly backed away from the necessity of polygamy in the eternities. But I 100% agree with you that apologetics today depend a lot more on “I don’t know.” It’s more accurate than what we’ve come up with in the past.
LDS blog discussions about apologetics seem to be like online discussions of chemicals. Eco warriors will proudly announce their disdain for them and then proclaim that in their house they only use vinegar, blackstrap molasses and natural oils. Likewise so many LDS blog commenters proudly announce their disdain for “apologetics” yet they willingly and vigorously engage in discussions about LDS doctrine.
KLC, LOL. Seems like there are a couple reasons. For years “apologetics” has been associated with the sometimes vicious and intellectually questionable tactics of classic engagement style. A lot of people don’t want to associate themselves with that, even though they are perfectly happy to defend the church in their unique style (scholarly, educative, pastoral).
Funny thing is, offline is similar, though likely more out of ignorance than prejudice. In Juliann Reynolds’ chapter, she talks about asking a group of Relief Society sisters whether they identified as apologists. Then she asked whether they identified as defenders of the church. It was 100% on the second question, but only a small minority on the first.
Late and really have nothing to add.
I do have one question and I don’t want this to disturb the course of the discussion. Is there any data beyond a series of antedotes that innoculation works? Does it keep people in the faith more than it sends them on the path away?
For me some topics are so toxic and indefensible that I don’t blame anyone for viewing them as deal breakers and leaving.
The only solution it seems to me is to stop letting our history define us. To move away from it and the perpetrators and eventually we can say- that has nothing to do with us today. Nothing!
One perhaps apples-and-oranges example: We all know how disturbing the Mountain Meadows Massacre is to more than a few. Local church leaders lead the killing of at least 120 people going to California in a devious and cold-blooded way. Yet John Knox, a Scottish Presbvterian founder lead the killing of over 20,000 Anglican pastors, many with his own hands. Modern Presbyterians and their critics could care less and it has nothing to do with them today. They are so far beyond John Knox that it really doesn’t matter. No apologetics needed.
Mike, I’m not aware of any solid research backing the inoculation theory. Based on what Elder Ballard said in his 2016 talk to CES educators, the hands of leaders were forced on the issue. He said they cannot expect churchmembers to remain within a safe, controlled bubble anymore. The youth *will* be exposed to unpleasant details of our history. The church feels compelled to get their faith-promoting version out there to compete with other voices.
Some studies *have* determined that loss of trust in leadership is a factor in disaffection, and part of that is not trusting church leaders to tell the truth about history. Inoculation partially addresses this issue.