{"id":48711,"date":"2024-01-01T22:26:20","date_gmt":"2024-01-02T05:26:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=48711"},"modified":"2024-12-31T23:04:48","modified_gmt":"2025-01-01T06:04:48","slug":"it-is-okay-for-the-church-to-defend-its-claims","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2024\/01\/it-is-okay-for-the-church-to-defend-its-claims\/","title":{"rendered":"It is Okay for the Church to Defend Its Claims"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Public Square Magazine article has been making the rounds about the history behind the <\/span>Church being caught flat-footed<\/span><\/a> in responding to probably the most influential piece of anti-Mormon literature of the 2010s. Not that people in the Church ecosystem didn\u2019t have good responses, but at the time it hit, the traditional institution on whom such a response would normally fall (the Maxwell Institute) had recently shifted emphasis, leading to a lacuna, and responses fell on the back of volunteers who had families to feed and callings to fulfill, so they were predictably delayed and probably less developed than they would have been had there been more institutional resources behind them. (There\u2019s been some debate about whether the PDF argument in the Public Square Magazine article holds up according to the timeline, but that\u2019s not the main point of the article.)<\/span><\/p>\n

We\u2019ve seen versions of this before. A book painting a very unfavorable picture about the Church during the Third Reich received <\/span>pushback from our own Jonathan Green<\/span><\/a>, once again on his own time while feeding a family, and the subject has only recently received a more thorough primary source-based treatment (and even then only in summary form) by an adjunct BYU employee doing side work for the BH Roberts Foundation.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When Church members were accused of shouting racial epithets at a volleyball game, if I recall correctly (open to correction on this point, working off of memory and a basic search), it took investigative reporting by the Cougar Chronicle, a largely right-wing, independent journalistic outfit (sidebar, oh how times have changed when it\u2019s the right wingers that have the edgy investigative journalistic outfits), to give BYU the ammunition to walk back its banning of the student involved and later put out a statement that they found no evidence of the epithet.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In each case no basic, institutional due diligence was done on any of these attack vectors. So should the Church fund hit teams that dredge up ad-hominems? Should they put all their time and resources into playing defense?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

No, and the specter of those boogeymen is used to run interference against even basic fact checking on hit pieces against the Church, although it is true that some stupid things were done in the FARMS years that gave the anti-apologists within the Church enough rope to hang them with, and I suspect (baldly speculating) that some of the inertia away from FARMS was part of the post-Prop-8 pendulum swing that we\u2019re now seeing the counter-swing to.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And sure, some of those antagonistic materials might have good points that the Church would then need to wrestle with, but only after those points have been vetted and fact-checked. I don\u2019t see why a healthy, robust, proactive defense should be controversial for the Church or any institution for that matter, whether it\u2019s an ecclesiastical organization or the Coca-Cola corporation. After we\u2019ve heard their side of the story we can make up our own minds, but it would be weird to be incensed at Coca-Cola for double checking the numbers of papers that find negative effects of their product.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Some may argue that that should be the responsibility for public affairs and not an outfit like FARMS, FAIR, or Scripture Central, but that\u2019s a misreading of what public affairs is. Public affairs as a profession is involved in the here and now, they aren\u2019t involved in hard vs. loose translation, Duetero-Isaiah, or what have you, issues that could use faith-affirming responses without the Church feeling obligated to stake some official position in this or that theory (since they are theories after all). Those are more esoteric issues that yes, occasionally seep into public affairs, but for the most part that\u2019s not their jam or what their training is in.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

There are of course a lot of drama and personalities involved in the Maxwell Institute and its legacy that I have no desire to comment on in terms of the particulars, but whatever was going on it is fairly indisputable that the Church\u2019s affiliated institutions, with all their resources, willing hands, and brainpower, took a very long time to muster any kind of a systematic response to the most effective piece of anti-Mormon propaganda of its decade (or virtually any piece of anti-Mormon propaganda in that decade), and that\u2019s a demonstrable fail unless you\u2019re part of that very niche, elite group that thinks that the truth and authority claims don\u2019t matter, and that the Church can coast by on nostalgia, history, and culture.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course things are better now, we have a variety of organizations that have filled the hole left by the old Maxwell Institute (although I suspect they could still hire a few more footnote checkers), and as long as those institutions are doing the basic due diligence work on hit pieces I see no reason why the Maxwell Institute can\u2019t keep doing what it has been doing, but there should never be any skittishness about any non-evil institution actually defending its claims in a direct way.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Public Square Magazine article has been making the rounds about the history behind the Church being caught flat-footed in responding to probably the most influential piece of anti-Mormon literature of the 2010s. Not that people in the Church ecosystem didn\u2019t have good responses, but at the time it hit, the traditional institution on whom such a response would normally fall (the Maxwell Institute) had recently shifted emphasis, leading to a lacuna, and responses fell on the back of volunteers who had families to feed and callings to fulfill, so they were predictably delayed and probably less developed than they would have been had there been more institutional resources behind them. (There\u2019s been some debate about whether the PDF argument in the Public Square Magazine article holds up according to the timeline, but that\u2019s not the main point of the article.) We\u2019ve seen versions of this before. A book painting a very unfavorable picture about the Church during the Third Reich received pushback from our own Jonathan Green, once again on his own time while feeding a family, and the subject has only recently received a more thorough primary source-based treatment (and even then only in summary form) by an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latter-day-saint-thought"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48711"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48711\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48719,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48711\/revisions\/48719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}