Let’s talk about LDS apologetics, with reference to a nice little piece at Deseret News titled “A Defense of the Defenders.” My own view is there can be good and bad apologetics, just like there can be good and bad criticism. It turns more on how the apologist or critic uses or abuses facts and evidence than on which side one takes in a disputed issue. The tone of the piece not surprisingly depicts LDS apologists as defenders of truth in a cynical, hostile world — that’s picking a side and glorifying it, not engaging in any discussion of how one should use facts and evidence and avoid deceptive, misleading, or downright dishonest tactics. Let’s try and do better and maybe say something productive about LDS apologetics.
Official LDS Apologetics: A Swing and A Miss. The Gospel Topic Essays came out about ten years ago. They were a bold attempt by LDS leadership to publish officially sanctioned defenses (apologies, in the classical sense of the term) of LDS doctrines and practices that are often the target of critics. They were apparently intended to be a resource for local LDS leaders, something to which a bishop could direct a concerned or questioning member of their ward. For a couple of years, they were sometimes referenced by LDS leaders.
Then they sort of fell off the radar, no longer discussed or referenced, although they are still posted at LDS.org. The best explanation is that the Essays were just Too Much Information for most mainstream members who read them. They raised more questions than they answered for most LDS readers. For a few who read them very carefully or who had a good knowledge base in LDS history and doctrine, they may have come across as misleading or worse. I think the LDS leadership sees the Essays in retrospect as a well-intentioned effort but, in the end, a mistake. It appears they have concluded indoctrination works better than apologetics, particularly with LDS youth and young adults.
- So what do you think of the Essays at ten years? Helpful to some? A failed attempt?
Unofficial LDS Apologetics in a Partisan World. Turn the clock back twenty years, when FAIR had its older and more accessible site and FARMS was still FARMS. There was some good material posted and sometimes there were friendly discussions between apologists and critics. (Both terms are misleading, but I won’t call apologists “defenders” any more than I would call critics “attackers.” Apologists often attack arguments and evidence they don’t like. Critics often defend an accurate as opposed to a selective or distorted historical record.) In other words, there was a time when the term “LDS apologist” did not carry such negative connotations. That has changed now. Even the author of the Deseret News piece, a FAIR official, said this: “Even after spending 12 years volunteering for the apologetics organization FAIR, I would never introduce myself as an ‘apologist’ because it’s just confusing.” I’m not sure confusing is the right term.
Now, in an age of hyperpartisan politics, amplified even more in the Age of Trump, a lot of that animus has bled over into religious discussion and LDS apologetics. Diehard LDS apologists often see the Maxwell Institute and BYU as a whole as part of that hostile and cynical world that true believers (LDS apologists and their supporters) are fighting against. To me, that shows that LDS apologists have sort of spun out of orbit, confirmed by the decision of LDS leadership to change the leadership and focus of the Maxwell Institute a few years ago. But you may have a different view.
- Has unofficial LDS apologetics lost its way? Is it less effective or helpful than it used to be?
Why You and I Might Defend the Church Sometimes. LDS apologists, academics, and bloggers aren’t the only ones talking about LDS doctrine and practice. There are lots of outsiders doing so, too. There are Evangelicals who proselytize LDS and try to protect their flock by denigrating LDS beliefs. There are political progressives who don’t like the Church on political and public policy grounds rather than religious grounds. And others. Some criticisms of LDS beliefs and practices and public statements are fair, some (many?) are unfair.
Just as I might disagree with an LDS statement or apologetic that is misleading or inaccurate, I disagree with criticisms of LDS beliefs and practices that are unfair or misleading. To be fair, it is really hard for an outsider to get an accurate and informed understanding of LDS history, doctrine, and practice as a basis for criticism. It’s hard even for LDS persons to get an accurate and informed understanding. Most LDS leaders both local and general don’t have an accurate and informed understanding of LDS history and doctrine. But the bottom line is that I’ll defend the Church against bad criticism.
- Have you ever defended the Church in print or in private conversation? Maybe something like this: “There are things I don’t like about the Church or disagree with, but the particular claim you are making is based on phony facts and just doesn’t make sense.”
Who Is In the Minority? There’s an odd claim made in the Deseret News piece. I’m just going to quote it, then discuss:
Truth, philosopher Søren Kierkegaard argued, is often found with the minority position precisely because that less dominant view is necessarily forced to defend itself and discover the truth, whereas the majority too often lived in a place of intellectual safety. As believers of all kind occupy that minority position more and more, let’s not make the mistake of adopting a cynically secular view of those defending faith.
The writer sees herself and other apologist/defenders (or possibly the shrinking pool of LDS believers) as an embattled minority. Personally, I would apply Kierkegaard’s view another way. The “dominant view” in the Church is the orthodox line preached and supported by LDS leadership and accepted by mainistream LDS. The “minority position” is a small percentage of LDS somewhat marginalized or at the fringe who stubbornly cling to membership in the Church while disagreeing with some LDS views and practices and hoping for change. No mainstream LDS has to defend themself in church on Sunday. No mainstream LDS has to “discover the truth” — they already have it, and everything in talks and the curriculum tells them they already have it. It’s only folks like you and me that need to think it through and do some discovery.
Now W&T draws readers from all across the spectrum, including mainstream LDS, active or inactive, fringe, and completely out, whether informally or formally. It may, in fact, be hard to place yourself on that spectrum. I’m not mainstream LDS but I’m not really fringe either. I often feel like there is no other LDS person who thinks quite like I do about the LDS Church and my place in it. I feel like I am in a category all to myself, just me. I’ll bet there are different reactions to this majority/minority idea.
- Do you feel part of an LDS majority or an LDS minority? A righteous minority? An embattled minority? A hopeless minority?
So I have thrown some questions/prompts into the body of the post rather than here at the the end. Go read the Deseret News piece and tell me what you think. About apologetics. About criticism (I didn’t get around to an endorsement of self-criticism as the best form of criticism). About the whole messy Church thing.
Wheat & Tares 
I’ll simply say this about LDS apologetics and the Gospel Topics Essays: they were much more damaging to my testimony than anti-Mormon web sites, podcasts, books, etc. The latter only came into my life when the former had blown open a hole in the official narratives. The first domino to fall was the GTE on Race and the Priesthood. As soon as I read that the Church now disavows teachings of past prophets I knew the whole thing was a house of cards, at least for me personally.
“I’m not mainstream LDS but I’m not really fringe either. I often feel like there is no other LDS person who thinks quite like I do about the LDS Church and my place in it. I feel like I am in a category all to myself, just me.”
Welcome, friend!
I feel like a lot of people spend a lot of time trying to label positions, attitudes, and camps in the Mormon world (apologist, critic, TBM, PROGMO, liberal, conservative, active, inactive, etc.). And maybe that is helpful at times, but in the end each person believes what they believe, and probably no two believe the exact same things. I tend to look at Mormonism like a big tent, an imperfect tent, that can reach over many different people and provide shelter from the heat of the day. I hope the tent continually enlarges as the world changes, and that more and more people feel comfortable taking some shelter under that tent, either for a time or for their entire lives. I hope that Mormon beliefs continue to evolve. I hope that Mormon people will carefully consider the culture with honesty, and seek to eliminate the toxic elements (and every culture has toxic elements). It is a never-ending process. But labels don’t usually tell a true story. And labels are often used to “other” people who think differently. So I don’t feel like a part of a majority or a minority. I am just a person who believes what I believe, observing and learning, and hopefully evolving. One reason I love reading W&T is that I learn SO MUCH. I am so grateful for this blog.
I mean, I’ve often used the same rhetorical device of quoting or referencing the immortals in defense of my position. But Socrates was manning the barricades to defend all of free thought, not a quirky denomination self-banished to sparsely populated places. Kierkegaard? I haven’t read his treatises on multiple wives and odd temple rituals, but I feel confident he would defend the right of grown adults to choose such things if so compelled. And I think that’s the rub. Hedelius seems to be arguing for the value in defending ALL faith, which just about no one would deny her, instead of focusing on the finer points of HER faith, which many people would disagree with. It makes me feel like Mormon apologists are, once again, insisting that “we’re Christian, too.”
Fine. You’re a Christian, too, except that the other denominations don’t think so, making your primary challenge the defense of Mormonism, not the defense of Christianity. The effort to demonstrate an apologist tradition from Socrates to Hedelius falls flat, to me, but it’s probably a damn sight easier than trying to convince other Christians that the BoM is actually a historical account of Christ’s visit to the Americas. Of course, I’m probably lobbing an irrelevant criticism given that the article is published in the Deseret News and will only be read by members who are plenty happy to have someone with professional credentials validate their oppressed minority worldview.
I am a regular, attending member of the church, but I do not believe in polytheism, I do not believe that mothers in heaven is an article of our faith, I do not believe that the Father had physical sex with Mary to give his seed to Mary (because that’s a natural law and God always obeys natural law), and I believe that apostles and prophets have erred (as the Gospel Topic Essay on race, cited by josh h) establishes. We also reject BY’s Adam-God theory, and JT’s argument about a sign of a fallen prophet who forbids polygamy. Church apologists do harm NOT when they teach what we know, but when they make up reasons without scriptural support, like the apostles and prophets who taught reasons why Blacks couldn’t have the priesthood, and if they did make it to the celestial kingdom it would only to be servants. Where the scriptures are silent, apologists, leaders, and teachers should be silent. I don’t think that the church taught about eternal gender from the beginning until Elder Packer taught it in the 90s, and when he did, he had an ulterior purpose, which was to take a strong position against homosexuality (a man in a woman’s body, or vice versa), but I am aware of no scriptures that address this subject, just as there are no scriptures that address heavenly parents (so I don’t want to hear about mothers in heaven from our pulpits–it might be true, but it isn’t an essential and necessary tenet of our doctrine, so we don’t need to proclaim it). I like Faith Over Fear’s big tent analogy: very little should exclude people from the faith. In other words, the faith should have very few required doctrines (meaning teachings): faith in Jesus as savior, in His death and resurrection, the existence of sin, Jesus’ conquest of sin and death, our own resurrection after death, the restoration in 1820-1830, and few more things, but not too many. Doctrine should unite, not separate, and we should be careful about drawing too many lines.
Despite their bloated egos, Mormon apologists do not have all the answers – they only pretend. FAIR and its progeny (Interpreter, et al.,) refuse to engage in true issue-oriented debate. Their default position is to evade, dismiss and criticize those who have questions. I argue that, in its current form, Mormon apologetics causes more harm than good and is truly a net negative for the image of the Church.
I have witnessed the damaging effects of the apologists’ tactics. Several years ago, I attended a presentation by Daniel Peterson on the topic of BoM truthfulness. From the start, it was clear that no dissent or critical questions would be tolerated. One brave audience member raised her hand and asked an innocuous question about revisionist history related to the use of the seer stone. Peterson immediately went into a rant about false information purveyed on the Internet and the questionable character of most Mormon critics. The poor lady who asked the question was clearly devastated and left the session in tears. So much for goodwill.
Unless the aging old-line apologists (Peterson, Ash, Sorenson, et al.,) are replaced with genuine, open-minded scholars, the state of Mormon apologetics will continue its inexorable decline. Unfortunately, Mormon leadership is content to ignore the collateral damage and tolerates the continued departures of those who seek truth.
Thanks for the comments, everyone.
Old Man, I guess we’re a category of two.
DeNovo, I’m not quite as harsh on the apologists as you are. My sense is that LDS leadership has taken a pragmatic approach to apologetics over the years, seeking to find the right approach that benefits (in the general sense) the work of the Church and the needs of its members. For many years the official Church carefully ignored critics. Then it tacitly supported unofficial apologetic responses by FAIR and FARMS. Then it brought FARMS into BYU and eventually renamed it the Maxwell Institute, honoring the late Elder Maxwell who supported apologetic work so critics didn’t have the field to themselves. And then the Church turned away from FARMS-style apologetics and revamped the Maxwell Institute into more of a Mormon Studies outfit stressing academic engagement with other religion scholars but also aiming to publish faith-affirming books and journals aimed at the mainstream LDS audience. The Gospel Topics Essays reflected the Mormon Studies approach of the new Maxwell Institute. For a few years, the LDS Newsroom did as well and published some very good content.
But now there seems to be another shift underway, moving away from the Mormon Studies and academic engagement approach to once again trying to ignore critics and instead fill the discussion space with narrowly focused pro-LDS content. It seems like ten years ago the idea was to work the Essays into Seminary and missionary prep courses, so young LDS were inoculated against some of the standard criticisms lobbed at LDS beliefs. Now I think the leadership wants to keep young LDS and missionaries as far away from the Essays and any candid online discussion (much less online criticism) as possible.
As for traditional LDS apologists, I don’t like many of their arguments, but the ones I have met and talked with are friendly enough. If I were on a long overseas flight and had to choose between having an LDS apologist or an Evangelical critic sitting next to me, I’d take the LDS apologist ten times out of ten. It just seems like both apologists and critics have moved farther to the ends of the spectrum, while anyone with a middle approach, who sees some merit to both sides of the discussion, no longer participates in their discussions. I think most of the interesting work has moved to Mormon Studies programs, conferences, and publications.
Great post. I’m with josh h about the GTEs. I think less so regarding the house of cards that josh h mentions and more just because I could really see a moving of goalposts that, in the end, didn’t help much. More than one member of the September Six got excommunicated for writing/saying some stuff that now exists in the GTEs. Yet those essays seem to have had little to no effect on the church membership at large, perhaps because of the constant retrenchment by our leaders despite the quasi-accuracy of some of the essays.
In the larger scope of apologetics, folks have already mentioned some of the main problems. THE main problem, IMHO, is the fact that there is little to no objectivity or reasonableness in the writings of many Mormon apologists; this is in part due to exactly what De Novo points out: they refuse to actually engage in a debate. And they refuse to do so because they are not intellectually honest and because they only have the appearance of being learned and objective, when many of them are, in reality, just pseudo-intellectual shills for the church. I’m. not really blaming them because it’s not their fault per se; the entire notion of apologetics is based not on objective fact-finding but on “proving” that which cannot be proven; the “truth” of the church, Joseph Smith’s teachings, etc. That’s all a matter of faith. So they’re already starting on a self-defeating path by trying to prove that which can’t be proven. Further, as De Novo points out, many of the more hard-line apologists like Daniel Peterson brook no argument and won’t actually entertain counter-arguments, even well-documented and well-thought out ones. To me, this is all just kind of ridiculous. If you start out trying to “prove” your side of things, you’ve already surrendered any kind of objectivity or fidelity to facts and instead embrace fidelity to your own beliefs (which, again, CANNOT be proven). All of which is to say, I can’t understand why Mormon Apologetics exist at all; if everything about religious belief is a matter of faith, why on earth would anyone try to make any attempt to “prove” that such beliefs could be factually ascertained in the first place?
So what do you think of the Essays at ten years?
My experience is that most members don’t know they exist. Not long ago, an older, lifelong member of the Church was telling me how wrong I was about some issue. I told him that what he was saying was not what is in the Gospel Topics essays. He had never heard of them. (And frankly dismissed what is in them.)
Has unofficial LDS apologetics lost its way? Is it less effective or helpful than it used to be?
Has apologetics ever been useful? Sincere, not snarky, question. I’ve certainly never found it useful. I think it is aimed at people who want to feel good about what they already believe. The treatment of real issues has generally been extremely superficial and sometimes fairly dishonest. If you just want to be told your beliefs are correct, that is helpful. If you have real questions, it is not. I don’t think we need a better name; we need better apologetics.
Have you ever defended the Church in print or in private conversation?
Yes, but I don’t think I’ve been effective. Most people already have their minds made up on any issue and don’t really want to listen to other perspectives. But it is extremely rewarding when I can find another person who actually does want to discuss an issue.
Do you feel part of an LDS majority or an LDS minority?
Extremely hard to answer. It definitely feels like I’m in a minority. If I were to ever say to an LDS person, Is PWS welcome at church?, I think the answer would be an immediate and probably sincere yes! However, if I were to say, Is someone who believes this (stating my beliefs without my name) welcome at church?, the answer would be not really because that person obviously doesn’t haven’t a testimony of the gospel and is probably fighting against the church as well. As a result, people who believe as I believe tend to be very quiet at church. However, as I age, I have become less quiet. Which leads me to see that I’m not as alone as I once thought.
Sometimes apologetics just feels like this exchange from Dumb and Dumber:
Mary Swanson : I’d say more like one out of a million.
Lloyd Christmas : [long pause while he processes what he’s heard] So you’re telling me there’s a chance. YEAH!
So what do you think of the Essays at ten years? I’ve always felt like A for effort, but a C+ at best for results. The polygamy one in particular is utterly terrible, and I have zero respect for Brian Hales and those who like his thoughts on the topic. But the real issue with the essays is that almost nobody has read them, and most members blissfully haven’t read them or given them a moment of thought, and the Church was fine with that, instead continuing to shovel out increasingly simplistic manuals (we are literally teaching the same things in Primary and Gospel Doctrine? And the other lessons are just recycled General Conference talks? When Pres. Nelson has the gall to claim doubters are “lazy learners” I can’t help but think of the level of projection required to make such a statement in today’s Church!) Nobody reads. Nobody knows anything. Nobody remaining has an ounce of intellectual curiosity.
Has unofficial LDS apologetics lost its way? Is it less effective or helpful than it used to be? This one’s an interesting question. Apologetics as a whole seems to be cyclical. Sometimes it’s more open and thoughtful, and other times, it’s like Joseph F. Smith era thinking (hide anything potentially damaging, even though it’s going to cause downstream issues). We are definitely in a more retrenched less thoughtful moment now, which I tend to think is an E. Oaks choice. I also suspect the majority of the existing Q15 (with the notable exceptions of Uchtdorf and possibly Gong, maybe a few others) are of that mindset. But they aren’t the actual apologists. Among the apologists, there are good and bad ones. There are a few that are really just a-holes, though, and nobody’s reining them in.
Have you ever defended the Church in print or in private conversation? So many times. But my own perspective is that you have to say both the good and bad things you see in order to see things accurately. When you only defend and don’t admit any of the bad, that’s just propaganda.
Do you feel part of an LDS majority or an LDS minority? Very much the minority. I have an increasingly hard time relating to anyone who is not in the minority at this point. The bulk of the membership is only getting worse the longer we go, not because they are orthodox, but because they lack empathy and are authoritarian. They are mostly cruel, unthoughtful people who attack others and pretend they are the victims.
On the minority question, it’s easy to compare apples and oranges. Do apologists and the true believing faithful think they are in the minority? Absolutely, because it’s them against the world. However, when you take it to a smaller pond, or maybe fishbowl is a better metaphor, of an LDS ward suddenly the doctrinaires are the majority and those who might have read the essays and (gasp) might not agree with everything taught in and by the church are the much smaller minority. It’s all about your perspective and people will quickly adjust that to fit the narrative they have about themselves in the current moment.
There does not seem to be any new thoughts in at least 30-40 years. I sit in Sunday ‘School’ and find that I am not learning anything. I am going through a ritual of confirming that I have all of my interpretations of the scriptures correlated with the other people in my class. Radio Free Mormon describes it as a Banquet of Milk. A room full of people asking questions that the answer has already been decided and sharing of scriptures that only have one approved meaning. I have all of the talks from last 20 general conferences on my person in the form of my phone. They are retellings of the same Milk Buffet. Everybody seems happy to go through the motions of affirming their special place in ‘Mormondom’.
This does not seem to be producing good people. We abuse LGBTQIA+. We are missing critical thinking skills and it is just so very boring and turning my children into activists against the church. Am I a minority? Yes, decidedly so.
The intellectual dishonesty in the Book of Abraham gospel topics essay broke my shelf. And I know there are a lot of people like me.
So, from the perspective of preserving membership, yes, publishing, the essays was a mistake.
To paraphrase a classic: “If you can’t say anything honest, don’t say anything at all.”
I don’t care if I’m in the majority or the minority or whatever at all.
What I care about is being able to look evidence in the face and come to a conclusion that makes sense and is supported by that evidence. The longer I’ve tried to stay in the church, the more impossible this has become.
The church wants us to start with the “right” conclusions before we do any research. That’s putting the conclusion cart before the research horse. It’s nonsensical. It’s not how research works. It’s not how truth or reality or anything works.
I don’t come to any conclusions until after I’ve examined the evidence. We’re no longer allowed to do this in the church, because they known darn good and well that the evidence does not support their claims. They say we can look at the evidence and ask questions, but only if we’ve decided upon certain authorized “conclusions” first! I will not do that.
No one has explicitly mentioned the Mormon apologetics low, when FAIR brought Kwaku El and sidekicks on board. That was trippy.
I really wish the gospel topics essays had happened many years earlier. And really, why do we need to keep members in under false pretenses? Can’t we be open & honest, and let each person decide for themselves?
I had a God crisis before the GTEs were published. God quite suddenly felt made up to me. But I still wanted to be Mormon.
Weird intellectual place in which to exist.
Weird spiritual place in which to exist.
When the LDS Church published the Gospel Topics Essays. I read each one as it was released, I was slammed. Information I’d read or heard before, but dismissed as being anti-Mormon, instead was confirmed to be true. I easily saw past the apologetics angle, but coming from a source that I recognized as admitting something that is true.
I am deeply grateful the LDS Church published the GTEs. I just wish it had happened earlier.
Anon: Amen! If you start with the conclusion (either direction), you aren’t really looking at the evidence. It’s all confirmation bias, which is frankly the basis for Alma 32’s test of truth. It’s all based (subtly) on the psychological principle that if you believe something hard enough, you will see the evidence that confirms your belief (unless it is just really really obviously wrong). Vibes are great and all, but not when applied to facts and evidence.
Regarding Alma 32, I have noted for the past 33 years that the epistemology that it describes is directly comparable to that described in Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions as the most important values for paradigm choice. Kuhn refers to puzzle definition and testability, accuracy of key predictions, comprehensiveness and coherence, fruitfulness, simplicity and aesthetics, and future promise. He observes that these serve value based decisions regarding “Which paradigm is better?” and “Which problems are more significant to have solved?” Not what the ultimate and final truth that will remain forever ensconced on our reference shelf to end all further discussions with finality. Alma 32 sets up a test, describes an experiment upon the word, talks about how discernable results lead to enlightenment of the mind, and enlargement of the soul, fruitfulness, further discovery and promise, but NOT perfect knowledge.
As to objectivity, consider Bacon, the father of the scientific method.
“Bacon, the philosopher of science, was, quite consistently, an enemy of the Copernican hypothesis. Don’t theorize, he said, but open your eyes and observe without prejudice, and you cannot doubt that the Sun moves and that the earth is at rest.” (Karl R. Popper, The Myth of the Framework: In Defence of Science and Rationality (New York: Routledge, 1994), 84–85)
You can’t say that Bacon was unscientific, illogical, or irrational. The problem is his own unconscious assumption that his claim to observe without prejudice is even possible. He cannot be self critical of his own paradigm if he is convinced that he does not have one. The problem is that in “N. R Hanson’s oft quoted words, ‘All data are theory-laden,’ the procedures of measurement and the interpretation of the resulting numerical values depend on implicit theoretical assumptions. Most of the time, of course, scientists work within a framework of thought which they have inherited. … But, says Feyeraband, when the background theory itself is at issue, when the fundamental assumptions and basic concepts are under attack, then the dependence of measurement on theoretical assumptions is crucial.” (Ian Barbour, Myths, Models, and Paradigms: A Comparative Study of Science and Religion, Chapter 6: Paradigms in Science (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 95).
And that is why Jesus says that judgement, criticism, discernment, ought to start with self criticism. Those who are not aware of their own controlling assumptions cannot be self critical of those assumptions, but will be unconsciously subject to them. So a key part of my own experience with faith has been, whenever I ran across something I did not expect, to pause and consider, “What should I expect?”
Back in the 90s, an outside observer of the “Book of Mormon Wars”, Massimo Introvigne observed that The Protestant Bible wars were fought between fundamentalists, who initially claimed for the Bible the same “truth” that Englightenment claimed for science, and
liberals, who denied that historical “truth” could be achieved at all. In the present Book of Mormon wars the opposite seems to be true: the liberal camp appears deeply rooted in the Enlightenment paradigm, while the orthodox (but not fundamentalist) position often
uses postmodernist arguments, claiming that absolute objectivity is a “noble dream” never achieved nor obtainable in historical studies.” (See Introvigne, JBMS 5/2 (1996) 1-25.
A great deal is determined by the examples that a person chooses to generalize from, that establish a person’s controlling paradigm. For instance, when Trump began his election campaign by claiming that Mexican immigrants were “murderers and rapists” it is not just legitimate, but essential to consider, what percentage of actual immigrants actually fits that description. The claim is testable, and we can consider with the predictions are accurate, comprehensive and coherent, fruitful, and promising. It is certainly simple. It certainly does not fit the footage of I seen of family groups migrants with young children in hand, carried in their arms and on parents shoulders. But while it does not match general observations, his does serve specific agendas, feed certain fears and desires. Joseph Campbell observes that one of the purposes of a mythology (the stories that define a community) is to sustain a particular social order.
My personal paradigmatic examples of personal significant and transformative LDS apologetics were Truman Madsen’s Eternal Man, and Nibley’s 1957 Priesthood manual, An Approach to the Book of Mormon. In his introduction, Madsen comments that “Letters of praise for their ‘objectivity’… miss my feeling that such merit they have is in their subjectivity. Their primary gesture is toward inner echoes, toward, as it were, the nerve endings of the spirit.” (Madsen, viii). And Nibley’s chapter 23, “Old World Ritual in the New World” makes his case that Benjamin’s discourse describes an ancient year rite, a coronation. In comparison, I noticed that Brent Metcalfe and Grant Palmer depect Mosiah 2-5 as reflecting a 19th Century revival. “(1) Revival Gathering (Mosiah 2); (Guilt -Ridden Falling Exercise (4:1-2a); (Petition for Spiritual Emancipation (v. 2b) and Christological Absolution and Emotional Ecstasy). (Metcalfe, New Approaches, 421 m 31. Palmer borrows this without attribution.)
Okay. Now we have to paradigms to compare. Which is better, and how do we measure better? According to Kuhn, consider testability and accuracy of key predictions, comprehensiveness and coherence, fruitfulness, simplicity and aesthetics. Welch summarizes Nibley’s 36 element pattern as follows: “the proclamation, transfer of kingship, assembly around the temple, taking a census, bringing firstlings and offerings, giving thanks for deliverance, dwelling in tents around the temple, the king speaking from a tower, the call or silentium and teaching of the mysteries, hailing the king, homage by the people to the king (which Benjamin rejects), cleansing from sin, acclaiming the king, recounting the story of creation, the king’s ritual farewell and descent into the underworld (which Benjamin refers to as a literal event soon to occur), choirs, ensuring succession to the throne, promises of peace and prosperity, the preservation of records, God preserving his people, promises of never-ending happiness, divination of the future, a day of judgment, falling to the ground before the king, seeing all men as equals, the closing acclamation, making of a covenant, receipt of a new name, begetting of the human race, concern about standing in the proper place, having a seal, recording names in a register, appointing priests to remind people of their covenant, and dismissal.” Not only does Nibley’s approach strike me as much more complex, detailed, and telling, but subsequent researchers added Feast of the Tabernacles, Day of Atonement, Sabbath Year, and Jubilee Year Elements, Alyson Von Feldt, noted Wisdom teaching patterns, and Mark Wright and Allen Christensen noted details reflected in the Mesoamerican lore, including the San Bartelo murals, which are contemporary with the Book of Mormon timeframe for Benjamin, and also depict a coronation on a tower. Plus, there are the interlacing chiastic structures, and the practical content, which a person can try to live without knowing any of this other contextual material.
Which approach best accounts for what we have here? This is not about “perfect knowledge,” (Alma 32:36) not about coerced submission and coerced conformity, but an invitation to consider and weigh what counts through personal experiment and exploration as “cause to believe.” (Alma 32:18). I’ve never read any secular account of the Book of Mormon that in any significant way accounts for my accumulated “cause to believe” on those five chapters of the Book of Mormon. Which problems are more significant to have solved? Which paradigm is better? It remains a value based decision, not a one bounded by rules that force everyone to the same conclusion. Anyone can dismiss all of this with a shrug and a “So what?” But what we notice and value, and what we ignore and thereby devalue, demonstrates to God what we think is more significant and telling.
I once gathered around seventy different arguments in the Bible directed against Biblical prophets. I eventually noticed that they all boiled down to people saying, “It’s not what I think,” or “It’s not what I want.” In The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell pointed out that many ancient temples had guardians that represented Fear and Desire, as barriers a person had to pass to enter the Real. In 3 Nephi Jesus calls for people to offer up the sacrifice of a broken heart, and a contrite spirit, basically, to offer up what we most desire, and what we think is so, what we fear. And it turns out that the Biblical passages that describe what a person should to do find truth collectively amount to deliberate process of offering up what we think and want in order to find what is Real, as an ongoing process.
Thanks for the long comment, Kevin. Lots to chew on there. Throwing Alma, Kuhn, Trump, Nibley, and Joseph Campbell into one comment is casting an awfully wide net.
Let me just respond to one item. The problem with reading detailed Old World ritual out of (into?) King Benjamin’s address is that the Book of Mormon describes one boatful of a dozen or two Old World immigrants who brought an early edition of the Hebrew Bible with them. They didn’t bring the entire Old World culture with them. They didn’t bring an Old World library along with them or a cadre of priests who were familiar with all the details described by Nibley. And what would three or four hundred years in the New World have done to the fairly sparse cultural toolkit those immigrants brought with them? You wouldn’t get a full-blown Old World ritual complex recreated in the New World. You could send a dozen boatloads of Israelite exiles and not get anything like a re-created Old World culture in the New World.
That’s like taking twenty average Americans and a Bible, transplanting them to some remote island, and then expecting the full curriculum of an American university to be current among their descendants three hundred years later. You just can’t squeeze that much cultural knowledge and practice into the heads of a dozen immigrants. That’s just not a realistic scenario. I understand that you may not like the proposal that King Benjamin’s address is just a repackaged version of 19th-century revivalist camp preaching, but at least that offers a credible path of transmission: Joseph heard such preaching and was familiar with the whole experience, then he incorporated a version of it into the BoM narrative, either consciously or unconsciously.
But when younger I did enjoy reading both Madsen’s Eternal Man and Nibley’s An Approach to the Book of Mormon before my mission. I still recommend Eternal Man. And we should also mention the conference Madsen organized at BYU that resulted in the book he then edited, Reflections on Mormonism: Judaeo-Christian Parallels, published in 1978. Nothing quite like it before or since. Madsen’s approach previewed what later blossomed into Mormon Studies, as opposed to the Nibley path that evolved into LDS apologetics. If Nibley was the godfather of Mormon apologetics, Madsen should be recognized as the godfather of Mormon Studies. Madsen deserves more credit than he gets. Maybe Nibley deserves less credit than he gets.
LDS scholarship is troublesome. It seems the best scholarship for the Gospel is coming from outside the Church these days. Gospel Topics Essays are problematic because they stand as evidence against the Restored Church—because they apologetically attempt to explain history, instead of teaching or clarifying principles. The Gospel Topics Essays read like the writers themselves aren’t convinced of what they are saying. Ironically, the Gospel Topics Essays have harmed as many LDS as the infamous CES Letter. Maybe the authors of the Gospel Topics Essays should be excommunicated too.
LDS apologetic organizations like FAIR play to a small fanboyish audience; the scholarship is generally horrific—anybody can participate, no matter how sloppy the thought process or dismantled the logic. FAIR especially lost me with their “Midnight Mormon” YouTube skits—irreverent, flippant, immature, idiotic. On the other hand, Interpreter Foundation can be credited for excellent scholarship (except when speculative theology goes too far). Maxwell Institute puts out a lot of substandard, meaningless garbage, likely due to the bureaucracy and culture that pollutes the BYU institution: Maxwell Institute feels like an extension of Deseret Book—both would be better burned to the ground for reconstruction.
Scholars like Nibley helped raise the consciousness of the congregation. Nibley’s expanded view of the temple should have been a blueprint for the entire CES.
Instead, correlation and curriculum (the spiritual food of the Gospel) has been dumbed down, white-washed, sanitized into a product that does not digest. We are being fed cardboard box and told it’s pizza. It feels like we are being sold false pizza. The apologetic delivery is not convincing. The empty pizza box has residue of cheese, grease, pasta sauce, but there is no pizza. The delivery driver says: Just eat the box, it kind of tastes like pizza.
This is exactly why I cite Kuhn so often, to show the patterns in values, in selectivity, and the way the framing story interacts with the selectivity and valuing. Look at the framing paradigmatic metaphor here: “That’s like taking twenty average Americans and a Bible, transplanting them to some remote island, and then expecting the full curriculum of an American university to be current among their descendants three hundred years later.” Is just Mosiah 1-5 the equivalent of “the full curriculum of an American university?” Is Metcalfe’s four step revival pattern sufficiently detailed, fruitful, meaningful, comprehensive and coherent and promising enough to account for everything without postuating an actual Mesoamerican Mosiah and Joseph Smith as translator? Or does Joseph’s story of Nephi and plates and a sea journey and father’s teaching sons a better way to explain more of the details? Or do we not bother with the details on the grounds that Sterling McMurrin proposed, not on the basis of his formidable education and intellect, but rather on a conviction reached when he was “younger than I can remember” that “You don’t get books from angels and translate them by revelation. It’s just that simple?” That makes Joseph managing “somehow” enough, and never mind the details.
I disagree with the requirement that Nephi’s ship needed to bring an entire Old World culture with them, (and consider that they entered an existing hamlet/village culture when they arrived.). All they needed to bring to account for Mosiah 1-5 is the Brass plates, a Priestly family from the appropriate cultural background, a temple tradition, and a prophetic line and a tradition that had retained enough adherents after a few centuries where conservative and traditional fathers “caused” that their sons “be taught in all the language of their fathers, that they might become men of understanding” (Mosiah 1:2) that the combined people of Mosiah and Zarahemla could “assemble on the morrow” for a combined traditional Israelite coronation, Feast of the Tabernacles and Day of Atonement ritual. Many years subsequent to his 1957 chapter, Nibley compared Mosiah 1-5 to the account of “Nathan the Babylonian, a writer of the 10th century a.d. who has left us an eyewitness account of the coronation of the Prince of the Captivity or Exilarch in Babylonia.” (See his “Assembly and Atonement” from 1998). If that compares the material on ancient coronations that Nibley drew on earlier, it is because of Jewish cultural traditions passed down from fathers to sons over many more generations than separates Lehi and the coronation of Zedekiah and Brass plates and Benjamin in a community that is also a minority in a larger surrounding culture. And if the details of an ancient coronation and pre-exilic festivals, described by Nibley and many others, (and buried in a footnote without comment by Metcalfe, and not mentioned at all by Palmer), as well as literary styles, are not easily explained in the same fine detail, nor the additional details assembled by Tvedtnes, Welch, Von Feldt, and others, which paradigm is better? If they amount to just the sort of thing that anyone hanging around a Palmyra revival could have picked up unconsciously, then, certainly, Alexander Campbell Jr. could have written it all up in “Delusions” and Abner Cole could have described it all in “The Book of Pukei” and there would be no need to postulate a ghost writer who had the benefits of a full curriculum of an American university, and the Spaulding theory to account for something that everyone admitted that Joseph Smith, left to his own devices could not have managed.
In paradigm debates, there are, as Kuhn says, no formal set of rules that forces everyone to the same conclusions. Paradigm choice is value-based, not rule based. And our choices inevitably broadcast those values to everyone. Asking “Which which paradigm is better?” is reasonable, if there are grounds for that decision that are not completely paradigm dependent, but the answer always demonstrates what we think are the problems “most significant to have solved.”
I’m quite fond of Madsen’s Reflections on Mormonism. I got mine back in 1978.
I feel a part of a hopeless minority. Especially after falling down the rabbit hole of the writer’s personal blog… “in my mind Pride Month is going to be Proclamation Month. We’re going to read the Proclamation on the Family more often, discuss it more, and especially bear testimony of how we know it’s true and are grateful it teaches us how to have joy. There are so many bite-size principles that children can latch on to and really love: every baby needs a mommy and a daddy. It is important and special to be a boy or a girl, and you were a boy or a girl in Heaven even before you were born. Preparing to be a mommy or a daddy one day is wonderful and important. Heavenly Father’s plan is for everyone to get married and have babies so they can be a family together forever.”
If this is the dominant view, which I know it is, I’m more fringe than I realized.
I think any discussion, apologetic or not, is virtually a waste of time. In today’s society of alternate facts and loyalty to either an individual or a cause, people will say whatever they have to “win” an argument. When lies are accepted as truth and quoted as fact, what is there left to defend? I’ve found for me as a rule of thumb, the louder someone is or the more they repeat something, the more likely they are to be misrepresenting the truth or outright lying. It’s not even apologetics anymore. It is extremely hard to “find the truth” when you try to talk about church finances, sexual abuse by leadership, anything political or related to LGBTQ, a woman’s right to choose, health issues, or even the Mountain Meadows Massacre which has been a subject of apologetic denials for over 165 years.
I have mentioned before that I am a closeted non-believer who teaches Gospel Doctrine. I usually try to tear down old notions, indirectly through questions or asides, examples from today’s lesson as follows-
1-Saul was not given a “new name” of Paul
2-why did we get rid of the Boy Scouts anyway? – my subtle takedown of the idea of continuing revelation
3-quotes from GAs with the message of Jesus said love everyone, treat them kindly too
4-how confident are we in our missionary message? – dog whistle to any of my fellow doubters in the class
5-quote from Ballard that says testimony bearing is not “stories, travelogues, and lectures” since I have a love-hate relationship with testimony meeting and/but do we really know what Paul said to Agrippa?
I happily and conscientiously avoid the obedience and us/them sections of the manuals.
Very much the minority here – my bishop works for the Church and I fear I would not lie to him in any private conversation if pressed about my faith. Stake Pres was actually in the class today – stay tuned…