The death of the Mormon Apologist - RIP 1832-2015

[_Symmachus]

I almost agree with the sentiments of the OP. Apologetics is nearly dead. And what they are doing at MDDB and Mormon Interpreter is not really apologetics.

Apologetics is a response (X) to a stimuli (Y); response means the X and Y are talking. Private apologetics is as contradictory a term as private criticism. When apologists stop talking to / arguing with critics and critics to/with apologists, they are no longer apologists and critics.

In a sense, traditional apologetics started to die when its practitioners first started plying their trade on the internet rather than in print, where Petersonian apologetics is completely dead by now. Indeed, I think there is an inverse relationship at work: the more internet-based Petersonian apologetics became, the less it operated in print (cf. the consistent flow of Nibley reprints, along with a pretty active article industry through FARMS and even a monograph or two throughout the 80s and 90s). As the book review became the dominant form of print apologetics at the MI, apologetics naturally became more about personality than about ideas, and it became a very natural step to work online, where discussion is rarely about ideas and rarely NOT about personality.

Print mediates that dynamic; writing a journal article is a long, tedious process that whittles away at the spontaneity and shallowness that characterizes internet "discussion." Writing a book is a years-long slog that forces one to think and rethink at every turn. It's hard to get an article published or to write a sustained work of scholarship if all you've got is ad hominem. Greg Smith seems determined to prove that it can be done, but working against him is the fact that most people who are not him would prefer to read 100+ pages about something interesting rather than summaries of Facebook posts. It's not just that print has certain rules but that you have to engage readers somehow. In the 80s and 90s the apologists were trying to engage readers by applying Nibleyism. Even if you were more of a Dialogue/Sunstone Mormon, at least they were some of the stuff they were writing was interesting enough to read (or at least to me it was). The turn to the ad hominem book review as the primary genre for apologetics (a boring genre because it is so predictable in both ends and means) meant that the Nibley brand of apologetics had run out of intellectual steam and started to rely on personality as it became Petersonian apologetics: and a personality focus is prime material for the internet.

One of the central mythologies of the internet is that it fosters openness and dialogue, difference and diversity, but of course it is actually a series of contiguous echo-chambers stocked with megaphones for narrow-mindedness and sameness. What gives rise to the mythology is that these echo-chambers are merely aware that there are other echo-chambers out there. But they don't listen to each other at all.

Another aspect of internet mythology is the so-called democratization of the practice of knowledge which is, in fact, the vulgarization of knowledge-work. Internet Mormonism is something I only encountered relatively recently (not very unusual for millennials, by the way, and see the recent article in the Washington Post about how most millennials prefer print, because having grown up with the internet, we understand better what it is and what's it's limits are, and it's not the novelty to us that it continues to be to baby-boomers and X-ers). Most of the so-called difficult questions were things I discovered through reading print (books and journals), not through Google or message boards. One of the things that I found difficult to understand when I did find forums like this is how easily someone could earn the label "apologist," both from other "apologists" and from critics: all you had to do, it seems, is express the views of a traditional believer. Whether one was an apologist or not was therefore an issue of personal taste. But in Nibleyan apologetics, as in most traditional kinds of apologetics, you were only an apologist if you actually produced a body of apologetic work. You actually had to make a kind of contribution. That criterion simply does not exist in internet-land, a place where clicking "like" is thought to be an act rather than the mere sentiment it actually is.

As far as I'm concerned, apologists are people like Hamblin, Peterson, and to a degree David Bokovoy. Most of the people that I've always thought of as apologists (people like my former teachers Stephen Ricks, Donald Parry, John Gee, Robert Millett, and many others) have almost no presence online (Gee's sporadic blog is the exception that proves the rule). You may hate or love their work, but at least they've actually done some work, small though that body may be. What is sad about especially Hamblin and Peterson is that without access to the print environment of the MI, they have become indistinguishable from people like Droopy. The only reason they are taken seriously as "apologists" is not because of what they say in the present in online fora but because of what they did in the past in print. If you didn't know that Daniel Peterson was behind "Sic et Non" you wouldn't even bother clicking the links to its pages that are frequently posted here. And just in case you forget who he is, the good professor has put a picture of himself in a benign and meditative gaze at the top (Hamblin too puts his picture at the top of his blog, tellingly; this is not something done by younger people who are largely unknown and who can't rely on recognition of past work for their present readership).

With a watered-down definition of what apologetics is and who apologists are, it is not surprising that these "apologists" have migrated away from places like this into the safer, self-contained sanctuaries. In the Hobbesian chaos of the internet, people naturally seek order. I don't fault them for that, but once they are in there refuges, you can't claim that what they are doing is apologetics because they are no longer responding to anything. It's an echo-chamber.

The only apologetics I see happening is at the new MI and especially Bokovoy and Givens. I suspect that one of the reasons Bokovoy is drawing the online ire of Petersonians is that he, unlike they, is actually producing a body of work in print. I don't doubt that they sincerely hate his ideas, but they are taking them seriously enough to respond because his ideas are actually in print and therefore will have a longer shelf-life than the comments section on "Sic et Non," or here for that matter (I think they leave Givens alone because he is a much harder target, and he threw them a bone by giving them some respectability in "By the Hand of Mormon," but really he was throwing the bone to Nibley, not the Petersonians). The traditional apologists did have a body of work, but the thing is that it was a very, very small body. Other than Nibley reprints, the main genre in print apologetics became the book review, which by the early 2000s had dwarfed what they had done in the 80s and 90s. There is not one substantial book that you could point to and say, "ah, now there is something that has had influence." Instead of using their control of the print apologetics to produce lasting contributions to Mormon intellectual life in the form of books that have long-term results, they wasted that control on short-term personality games that are better suited for internet echo-chambers than genuine apologetic operations. In their propensity to squander resources and their fondness for missing opportunities, they have shown themselves typical of their generation, as they have also in their disgust with the younger generation of apologists who are actually trying to do something useful and meaningful in the face of bitter resentment from their more well-known elders. If only what they are well-known for were something more substantial than book reviews and more beneficial than their pre-internet embrace of some of the worst parts of internet culture.

[_DarkHelmet]

The best this forum can do is claim is Kevinsim and Tobin as LDS inc APOLOGIST?


JHC!

Point well taken lostindc.

Mak, maybe an apologist...but KS and Tobin....blahahaha. That is some funny s*** man. ...

Serious question boys.... when was the last time either of you attended the temple?

Tobin's not an apologist. He knows the church and their leaders are frauds, the Book of Mormon is fiction, etc. and has said it many times. He's more like Nightlion. He claims to have the real truth that both the church and it's critics are missing.

[_Mayan Elephant]

I almost agree with the sentiments of the OP. Apologetics is nearly dead. And what they are doing at MDDB and Mormon Interpreter is not really apologetics.

Apologetics is a response (X) to a stimuli (Y); response means the X and Y are talking. Private apologetics is as contradictory a term as private criticism. When apologists stop talking to / arguing with critics and critics to/with apologists, they are no longer apologists and critics.

In a sense, traditional apologetics started to die when its practitioners first started plying their trade on the internet rather than in print, where Petersonian apologetics is completely dead by now. Indeed, I think there is an inverse relationship at work: the more internet-based Petersonian apologetics became, the less it operated in print (cf. the consistent flow of Nibley reprints, along with a pretty active article industry through FARMS and even a monograph or two throughout the 80s and 90s). As the book review became the dominant form of print apologetics at the MI, apologetics naturally became more about personality than about ideas, and it became a very natural step to work online, where discussion is rarely about ideas and rarely NOT about personality.

Print mediates that dynamic; writing a journal article is a long, tedious process that whittles away at the spontaneity and shallowness that characterizes internet "discussion." Writing a book is a years-long slog that forces one to think and rethink at every turn. It's hard to get an article published or to write a sustained work of scholarship if all you've got is ad hominem. Greg Smith seems determined to prove that it can be done, but working against him is the fact that most people who are not him would prefer to read 100+ pages about something interesting rather than summaries of Facebook posts. It's not just that print has certain rules but that you have to engage readers somehow. In the 80s and 90s the apologists were trying to engage readers by applying Nibleyism. Even if you were more of a Dialogue/Sunstone Mormon, at least they were some of the stuff they were writing was interesting enough to read (or at least to me it was). The turn to the ad hominem book review as the primary genre for apologetics (a boring genre because it is so predictable in both ends and means) meant that the Nibley brand of apologetics had run out of intellectual steam and started to rely on personality as it became Petersonian apologetics: and a personality focus is prime material for the internet.

One of the central mythologies of the internet is that it fosters openness and dialogue, difference and diversity, but of course it is actually a series of contiguous echo-chambers stocked with megaphones for narrow-mindedness and sameness. What gives rise to the mythology is that these echo-chambers are merely aware that there are other echo-chambers out there. But they don't listen to each other at all.

Another aspect of internet mythology is the so-called democratization of the practice of knowledge which is, in fact, the vulgarization of knowledge-work. Internet Mormonism is something I only encountered relatively recently (not very unusual for millennials, by the way, and see the recent article in the Washington Post about how most millennials prefer print, because having grown up with the internet, we understand better what it is and what's it's limits are, and it's not the novelty to us that it continues to be to baby-boomers and X-ers). Most of the so-called difficult questions were things I discovered through reading print (books and journals), not through Google or message boards. One of the things that I found difficult to understand when I did find forums like this is how easily someone could earn the label "apologist," both from other "apologists" and from critics: all you had to do, it seems, is express the views of a traditional believer. Whether one was an apologist or not was therefore an issue of personal taste. But in Nibleyan apologetics, as in most traditional kinds of apologetics, you were only an apologist if you actually produced a body of apologetic work. You actually had to make a kind of contribution. That criterion simply does not exist in internet-land, a place where clicking "like" is thought to be an act rather than the mere sentiment it actually is.

As far as I'm concerned, apologists are people like Hamblin, Peterson, and to a degree David Bokovoy. Most of the people that I've always thought of as apologists (people like my former teachers Stephen Ricks, Donald Parry, John Gee, Robert Millett, and many others) have almost no presence online (Gee's sporadic blog is the exception that proves the rule). You may hate or love their work, but at least they've actually done some work, small though that body may be. What is sad about especially Hamblin and Peterson is that without access to the print environment of the MI, they have become indistinguishable from people like Droopy. The only reason they are taken seriously as "apologists" is not because of what they say in the present in online fora but because of what they did in the past in print. If you didn't know that Daniel Peterson was behind "Sic et Non" you wouldn't even bother clicking the links to its pages that are frequently posted here. And just in case you forget who he is, the good professor has put a picture of himself in a benign and meditative gaze at the top (Hamblin too puts his picture at the top of his blog, tellingly; this is not something done by younger people who are largely unknown and who can't rely on recognition of past work for their present readership).

With a watered-down definition of what apologetics is and who apologists are, it is not surprising that these "apologists" have migrated away from places like this into the safer, self-contained sanctuaries. In the Hobbesian chaos of the internet, people naturally seek order. I don't fault them for that, but once they are in there refuges, you can't claim that what they are doing is apologetics because they are no longer responding to anything. It's an echo-chamber.

The only apologetics I see happening is at the new MI and especially Bokovoy and Givens. I suspect that one of the reasons Bokovoy is drawing the online ire of Petersonians is that he, unlike they, is actually producing a body of work in print. I don't doubt that they sincerely hate his ideas, but they are taking them seriously enough to respond because his ideas are actually in print and therefore will have a longer shelf-life than the comments section on "Sic et Non," or here for that matter (I think they leave Givens alone because he is a much harder target, and he threw them a bone by giving them some respectability in "By the Hand of Mormon," but really he was throwing the bone to Nibley, not the Petersonians). The traditional apologists did have a body of work, but the thing is that it was a very, very small body. Other than Nibley reprints, the main genre in print apologetics became the book review, which by the early 2000s had dwarfed what they had done in the 80s and 90s. There is not one substantial book that you could point to and say, "ah, now there is something that has had influence." Instead of using their control of the print apologetics to produce lasting contributions to Mormon intellectual life in the form of books that have long-term results, they wasted that control on short-term personality games that are better suited for internet echo-chambers than genuine apologetic operations. In their propensity to squander resources and their fondness for missing opportunities, they have shown themselves typical of their generation, as they have also in their disgust with the younger generation of apologists who are actually trying to do something useful and meaningful in the face of bitter resentment from their more well-known elders. If only what they are well-known for were something more substantial than book reviews and more beneficial than their pre-internet embrace of some of the worst parts of internet culture.

great post.

only thing i would add is that these echo-chambers that you refer to have multiple purposes. you have identified the most obvious ones and touched on the other piece which is one that we discuss in creative consumer groups - marketing. Facebook, blogs and even forums are a HUGE part of marketing now. and these tightly held and controlled groups led by the marketer/moderator are a way to control the dialogue and advertise the product.

the very very best we have seen with this is dehlin and mormonstories. he does not allow anything, ANYTHING, that remotely resembles dissent or disagreement in his forums or groups. when he is done being "angry," it is time for the group to be done being angry. his forum is a reflection of the brand and the product. dehlin calls it his "living room," and suggests the forums are a reflection of him and his home.

the apologists have tried, desperately, to replicate this with sic et non, and multiple board efforts. their biggest issue is that their product sucks, they are trying to sell a shamwow that is not absorbent. but the other issue is that they goddamn suck at their marketing and salesmanship. they suck at managing a conversation and they suck at hosting a community.

Mormons are used to being told to what community they belong, and when they should arrive on sunday for three hours and when they are responsible for cleaning the community clubhouse. dan and his idiots seem to think that their clients will just show up because they are told to be there and believe their silly crap.

all one really needs to compare is this - sic et non/Interpreter v. the rest (Mormon Stories, Bloggernacle, Times and Seasons, By Common Consent, etc.) all those other names and brands are going to attract people's attention before anything called sic et non. it is the equivalent of naming your congregation the Highland 46th Ward and expecting people to show up because they are told to show up, or naming it the Highland Community and Family Congregation and actually trying to get families in your congregation. dan thinks like a Mormon, while other people are behaving like educated adults marketing to Mormons. that is what is killing the apologist business.

[_BartBurk]

The Jehovah's Witnesses aren't true either, and they're not on the verge of collapse. For that matter, there's all sorts of churches out there peddling BS that are likewise not on the verge of collapse, despite the sanitizing light of truth as we've been able to ascertain it over the last couple hundred years.

Where do we get this idea that since the church isn't true, it must be doomed? What history bears this out?

I do think the church will change, and probably shrink somewhat, but for most of the same reasons the other churches continue to exist despite teaching falsehoods, it's not going away anytime soon.

The Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists and other Christian groups offer their interpretation of scripture. In the Jehovah's Witness' case they don't even claim it is driven by the Holy Spirit (I think they reject the Holy Spirit), but on their intellectual ability alone. It is much easier to sell that than it is to sell new scriptures with doubtful historical legitimacy. Perhaps that is why the Witnesses and the Adventists are growing so much more quickly than the Mormons.

[_kairos]

Does Mormonism have a single point failure? gold plates, FV, archeology, smith's character, historicity of Book of Mormon or Book of Abraham? is there one on this list or otherwise that given preponderance of evidence will cause the house of cards to collapse? or is the single point failure to be an apostle who just can't live with himself anymore and outs the religion to the public as a sham? or will the failure come bottoms up- a friend or neighbor loses faith, tells another sibling or friend who comes to disbelief and it goes viral?

i believe it will happen/is happening bottom up- "poor baptisms, eg the weak minded, needy investigators or social welfare cases in africa or SA " as opposed to the white family believing and joining together-btw that stat must be buried in fp vault.

twenty years of poor baptisms and loss of previously strong RM's and their families will sure affect growth rates, tithing and wealth of the church.

i'm also waiting on holland or oaks or equivalent to convert to evangelicalism as a starter on the slippery slope.


just musing
k

[_ldsfaqs]

The death of the Mormon Apologist - RIP 1832-2015

Nope, we simply have better things to do then saying the same things over and over and over again to the same people over and over again for the last 10 years.

We will pop in once in while.... but you all are old news. We've debunked you many times. And have little interesting in continuing to waist our time with indepth responses most of the time, or even responding at all. Those of you who have paid attention, for some time now I've posted more on Politics rather than LDS subjects, because you guys are boring, I've already waisted my time plenty trying to explain the whole and actual truth to you people on LDS subjects.

But since the anti-mormon isn't interested in the actual truth, we leave you to your bigotry most of the time.
Just let you keep patting yourselves on the back on your little forum, your continuing to belittle a religion and people, year after year after year, saying the same things over and over again, which still aren't true, but half truth thus lie, or complete lie.

[_KevinSim]

The best this forum can do is claim is Kevinsim and Tobin as LDS inc APOLOGIST?

JHC!

Point well taken lostindc.

Mak, maybe an apologist...but KS and Tobin....blahahaha. That is some funny s*** man. ...

I don't know whether to take that as a compliment or an insult. Cwald, can you clarify what you meant by it?

Serious question boys.... when was the last time either of you attended the temple?

I attended the Provo Temple just this afternoon.

[_Tobin]

I don't know whether to take that as a compliment or an insult. Cwald, can you clarify what you meant by it?

It's intended as an insult. It is best to ignore cwald for the most part. He's a child.

[_Nightlion]

Tobin's not an apologist. He knows the church and their leaders are frauds, the Book of Mormon is fiction, etc. and has said it many times. He's more like Nightlion. He claims to have the real truth that both the church and it's critics are missing.

Yeah, uhuh, Tobin abounds in his one and only idea of Alien gods. I can see the resemblance. Sure. And we all know how many scriptures back up his notion. Special are we.

[_honorentheos]

Pure brilliance.

Well said.