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Having friends on all "sides" of such debates, I am disheartened when I see these friends assuming the worst of one another, vilifying each other, and seemingly even hating each other. This doesn't always happen, and sometimes the ill feeling goes only in one direction, or more from one side to the other. But it happens. A lot. And once it breaks out, it's highly contagious.
Watching it pains me. For whatever reason, I find it easy to assume the best of just about everyone involved in these discussions--to think that they're sincere, good-hearted, and pursuing truth. Maybe it's partly just that having a diverse range of serial selves creates empathy for a correspondingly diverse range of others. :-P In my life journey so far, I may well have been, at one time or another, at a similar point in how I viewed Joseph Smith and Mormonism to where each of you are.
I'm also bothered for very practical reasons when people in discussions on Mormon history mock and dismiss those with differing views, particularly other faith perspectives. It bothers me because, in my experience, engaging a wide range of perspectives is essential to the process of getting at truth. Science, for instance, doesn't work by having a bunch of intellectual clones go and think all the same thoughts and act within the same parameters. Nor does scholarship in general. To the contrary! Scholarship works by having people from a wide range of presuppositions, motivations, methodologies, abilities, and past experiences talk to one another within a framework of shared conventions of rational and civil discourse, documentation, peer review, and so on.
If any of you--whatever your religious or philosophical beliefs--thinks that the truth about Mormon history has been brought to light exclusively when the subject was approached from your particular faith perspective or ideological angle, or that approaching it always and only from that angle will generate the fullest and most accurate picture, I'm sorry but you're up in the night. The facts demonstrate exactly the opposite.
From the beginning, much of what we've known about Joseph Smith's polygamy has come to us via both nonbelieving and believing sources. Among the various people behind the creation of important historical records on the subject are John C. Bennett, Joseph Smith III, Joseph F. Smith, Wilhelm Wyl, and Andrew Jenson--a motley assortment if ever there was one. And among those who've helped excavate these sources and fit them together are Fawn Brodie, Stanley Ivins, Danel Bachman, Lawrence Foster, Jerald and Sandra Tanner, Todd Compton, Mike Quinn, Brian Hales, and me (during both my ex-Mormon atheist and active Latter-day Saint days). Do you see a common thread of religious belief among these scholars? Or, contrariwise, am I blind? Do you see this too?These scholars run the entire gamut of faith, non-faith, and anti-faith in Mormonism The idea that we gain accurate information about the Mormon past principally or overwhelmingly from those who share our own religious views is flatly false, no matter what those views are.
Scholarship on Mormon history is, like the sciences and scholarship more broadly, a conversation that becomes more interesting and productive the more diverse voices are added to it. So, perhaps rather than trying to drown out voices divergent from our own, we could recognize that even when they disagree with us on fundamentals of worldview and approach--or, often, because they disagree with us on such fundamentals--they, with us, contribute to an exponentially richer and fuller exploration of the possibilities than any of us could ever hope to create by talking just with our ideological in-group.
It would be a simple illusion to think that any one individual or ideological clique is going to piece together The Big Picture of the past. The process of putting diverse ideas and interpretations into conflict and thereby subjecting them to critique, reformulation, hybridization, and testing against the sources, just is how, in the long run, we flesh out the past.
This crucial role of diverse opinions, and of conflict between, them in the search for truth is attested not only in the philosophy and practice of science and academic scholarship, it is also an insight conveyed within various religions and wisdom traditions.
Jewish proverb has it that, "If two of us agree, one of us is unnecessary." And the Talmud and Mishnah are textual embodiments of that principle, running arguments between scholars across centuries.
Joseph Smith once preached "setting forth the evils that existed, and that would exist, by reason of hasty judgment, or decisions upon any subject given by any people...judging before they had heard both sides of a question."
And, my favorite: 'Abdu'l-Bahá, one of the Founding Figures of the Bahá'í faith, taught, "The shining spark of truth cometh forth only after the clash of differing opinions."
We are all, ultimately, contributing to the same larger process of sorting out the truth. Realizing this, can't we maybe be a little kinder to those frustratingly and intransigently different but absolutely essential critics and interlocutors on the "other" side? Then the time, energy, and emotion now invested in mean-spirited meta-discussion could be invested, instead, in figuring stuff out. Among the first new things we might discover in this approach would be good will, mutual respect, and a wider circle of friends. And with more substantive discussion and fuller engagement with each other's ideas, the process of winnowing out the truth could be faster, finer, and more effective.
How would it be?
Don
