Kishkumen wrote:Symmachus has raised some interesting questions. Certainly technology has changed the playing field and the defense of Mormonism has taken many new and interesting forms. I am not convinced that apologetics is to be equated with writing books and articles. Apologetics can include a wide array of activities that involve the defense of faith. Unfortunately, we are conditioned by our history engaging with a certain kind of apologist and his work to see it much like the blindfolded guru who holds his part of the elephant and defines it only partially. I would submit that a more sweeping vista on the history of apologetics would help us greatly here.
Greetings, great and noble Kishkumen. I wish I could begin this late reply with a Petersonian flourish about how I’m late respond because I’ve been pal-ing around with rich catamites on a cruise in the eastern Mediterranean and how, after a very thrilling experience of a Wagner revival at the Instanbul opera house, we all went out for a late dinner with a former mission president and the archbishop of Canterbury. Alas, the truth involves snow-packed roads rather than Mediterranean cruises, nary an archbishop or mission president, and fewer catamites.
I think I would agree that a broader view of apologetics is/was/should/could be needed. That's actually part of the reasoning for my introducing print vs. internet. Looking at what's been written rather than coded via iPhone would draw a wider definition for apologetics, not just to include Nibley, Stephen Ricks, Robert Millett et al. but also B.H. Roberts, Truman Madsen, and even these days David Bokovoy and Ben Park. Even, in a strange way, Sterling McMurrin. What all these scholars have in common is a basically constructive ethos: to engage with the dominant, non-LDS modes of thought and in the process create news of way of thinking about various aspects of Mormonism. There is a point to what they're doing. Defending the faith doesn't mean refuting the opposition point-by-point (at least not
just doing that) but defending its right to exist an intellectually respectable system within the broader cultural economy. But that kind of work generally can’t be done online; it’s just too ephemeral a medium for constructive, creative ambition. Online apologetics is really so much more limited in aims, as well as in its methods, and, to be frank, it really isn't that wide an array of activities: faithful blogger A writes to attack Kate Kelly (or Dehlin, or whomever), NOMish blogger B responds in kind, and then a host of Facebook feuds and comment-section bickering. This sort of "dialogue" stays focused on ideas for a short space before finally giving way to what are often quite venomous personal attacks. That makes sense, though, if you image (as I do) social media to be largely a self-directed advertising process for your own personality cult. It's a dim view, but I've got good reasons for it.
Although my view of apologetics might seem based on some very unusual definitions given the way that “apologist” and “apologetics” are used in internet Mormonism, in a sense they reflect a rather traditional understanding of apologetics, though not a simplistic one, I hope. Engaging with non-Christian intellectual traditions is what helped Christianity create its own distinctive Christian culture and its own Christian traditions. True, some of the apologetic masterpieces of early Christianity are very personalized, very minute refutations. But that’s not all they are. Christian apologetics was the intellectual superstructure onto which Christian though could be imposed. Many of the various strands of Christianity have followed similar paths, and a similar dynamic was at work in early Islam and medieval Judaism (Hellenistic Judaism had tried but not quite succeeded to create a lasting tradition, for various reasons, some internal and some not). In all these cases, defense of the faith is part of it, but only to the extent that defense is active rather than passive and leads to something more than that, something enduring and lasting. No Christian apologist worth his salt would have thought it enough simply to refute an opponent; the whole point of even the most combative apologetics (like Tertullian, for instance) was to show not only why your opponent’s view was wrong but (more importantly) why yours was in every way superior, even on your opponent’s own terms. In short, apologetics should be a creative enterprise.
Mormonism (parvis componere magna) has had the slightest beginnings of this. B.H. Roberts’s great history started as a series of articles for an American history magazine that were written to refute what he had considered terrible misrepresentations of the Mormon past. It became the
Comperhensive History of the Church, still the most, well, comprehensive history there is for the first century of Mormonism. Nibley’s first Mormon publication of any kind was
No Ma’am, That’s not History. It’s terrible scholarship, but although much of Nibleyan style, polemic, and shoddy methodologies were there, for the most part his later work transcended that rather juvenile pamphlet. Nibley’s apologetic went beyond mere tit-for-tat and became a creative endeavor in its own right, as he practically invented whole-cloth a new and invigorating perspective from which to view Mormon scriptural claims (even if, like me, you think this is mostly bunk, still it was something; as the great philosopher Walter Sobchak once said: “At least it’s an ethos, man”).
On the other hand, the Peterson-Hamblin school, although it is clearly rooted within the Nibley tradition, has never been able to get past mere imitation of Nibley’s worst qualities and most obvious approaches; as a result, it has basically a destructive ethos: just slash and burn whatever doesn't buttress the status quo. Responding to critiques in a way that is creative and leads to new ways of thinking about Mormonism is not their priority. I doubt they would disagree with that, since I doubt they see that as the aim of apologetic work. In either case, nobody reading this could point to a single book written in the past thirty years that, at best, isn’t just a rehash or imitation of Nibley. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find any books from the past thirty years at all. The only genre they have excelled in and added to Mormon intellectual life is the extended book review shot through with innuendo and ad hominem, and I doubt that anyone is going to care if it goes gentle into that good night—and soon.
That is because their approach cannot sustain the sort of rigor that writing a book requires. On the other hand, their approach is ideally suited to internet culture, where the biting comment, the snide remark, and the personal attack are primary weapons in the preservation of the status quo and promotion of one’s own personality cult (i.e. "social" media). If you think of apologetics as more than just defending your own personal religious tastes—not because they are better but simply because they are yours—there is a limit to what internet-style “apologetics” can do, because you can't build lasting structures through Facebook posts and a Patheos blog. There is a huge difference between Facebook clicktivism and real activism (as so many people like to point here about Johh Dehlin), just as there is a huge difference between being able to organize large rallies through social media and implementing actual political change. Taking that same dim view of what the internet actually encourages people to do (or not to do), I say there is a huge difference between what Nibley did and what Peterson has done. People will still be talking about Hugh Nibley in fifty years, but I doubt anyone will even bother to look up
Sice et Non on the Wayback Machine, which is where it will be soon enough.
In sum, if I'm a restricting the definition, it is between creative and productive approaches more interested in long term cultural value and between those approaches that are more ephemeral in their interests (e.g. attacking the latest Facebook post from John Dehlin). So far, online apologetics has failed to say anything new; maybe someday its practitioners will, so perhaps it is at this point merely accidental that the distinction between creative and destructive maps directly onto the divide between print and internet, but I think the nature of these media plays a very large part in this.
"As to any slivers of light or any particles of darkness of the past, we forget about them."
—B. Redd McConkie