Mormon Interpreter Guns for the MI

[_Gadianton]

The Interpreter has rolled out the big guns in the form of Cousin Paul from the South, who has no time for the high highfalutin nonsense of the academic philosophers of the new Maxwell institute, in a new article on the Interpreter's primary blog. Just a guess here, but I'm thinking that Wyatt peer reviewed this one to the top of the pile, and I think we have to wonder if it's no less than a commissioned piece from the family out west.

https://www.mormoninterpreter.com/to-be ... /#comments

Peterson gives Bushman a pass, but goes after Miller, Hickman, and even fair-minded Patrick Mason with barrels blazing. Basically, his charge is that they're intellectuals and speaking gibberish. Several times in his review he's reminded of a story that paints the new MI as silly, rather than formulating an argument.

A young college freshman returned home for Christmas at the end of his first semester, a semester in which he had an introductory English course where he was taught “critical thinking,” an introductory sociology course where he was taught about the social construction of reality, and an introductory philosophy class where he learned about his place in the “space state.” When he arrives at home, his mother hands him a glass of water. He says (without a thank you), “This is a glass of water. Or is it a glass of water? And if it is a glass of water, why is it a glass of water?” Shocked, the mother is befuddled at what has happened to her son.

The above was the story he told to dismiss Miller.

His dismissal of Mason is breathtaking. Targeting Mason as Mason waxes poetical:

With eternity as its backdrop, Mormonism is a religion … that could meaningfully converse with modern philosophies and ideologies from transcendentalism to liberalism to Marxism

I think we get what Mason is saying, though, right? Well, Peterson merely saw red and charged.

In the Marxist view, all our intellectualizing is a waste of time and will bear no fruit. In this world, Mormonism, like all other religions, is a fraud; religion, philosophy, and self-consciousness are nonsense.

Taking after Cousin Dan, who is known to argue materialism is trivially self-refuting, Peterson shows that Marxism is likewise self-refuting. But Mason didn't come out as a Marxist or anything like that, all he did was say that Mormonism is timeless and can converse with anyone. Well, Peterson certainly showed him that's a crock, since Marxism undermines itself, one can't really have a conversation with it now, can they?

He sums up with this:

What seems clear from this collection of essays is that the Maxwell Institute remains adrift

As you imagine, Peterson gets a heroes welcome from the Mopologists in the comments, especially from Migdley.

Migdley says, referring to this statement about the new MI adrift, "Paul Peterson might not have gone far enough...

this collection of essays is a further indication of the “new direction” that was fashioned after the successful coup, which was driven by low motives–that is, by envy and petty personal hostility, and not even by some strange revisionist ideology, at least according to what was an abject apology issued by one of those involved in the plot to expel Daniel Peterson (and his associates) from the Maxwell Institute.

Wow!

I mean, I find this utterly fascinating. Mason's dare to suggest Mormonism could converse with Marxism as one of many conversation partners, has nothing to do with "revisionist ideology". Masons big tent, and Miller's nerdy speculations are evidence of envy and pettiness, and a plot to personally overthrow Cousin Dan.

This is just nuts. But I think Migdley's comments definitely indicate how Wyatt got this thing published so quickly.

[_moksha]

Sort of makes sense. Once you master the art of the hit piece you don't want to get rusty from lack of repetition. Besides, being the champions of doctrinal purity will help put post-Maxwellian apologists in the good graces of certain hardcore Brethren (hopefully).

[_Symmachus]

I find myself in agreement with Paul Peterson, to the extent he is accurately portraying the views he attacks, though the excerpts from Miller, Hickman, and Mason don't look pretty.

the Book of Mormon suggests that its faithful readers will honor and sustain Native peoples without the missionary agenda or ethnocentric paternalism found within secular history. This reading, it seems to me, commits readers to the project of decolonization, an undeniable part of which is the renewal and reinvention of non-Christian Native spiritual practices

I can only wonder at the size of the rectum wherein Hickman's head was ensconced (presumably it was very small) while attempting to read the Book of Mormon, one of the persistently stated themes of which is proclaimed on the very first page, written by the man from Moron:

Which is to show unto the remnant of the house of Israel [i.e. colonized indigenous people] what great things the Lord hath done for their fathers; and that they may know the covenants of the Lord, that they are not cast off forever—And also to the convincing of the Jew and Gentile [i.e. everyone, including colonized indigenous people] that Jesus is the Christ, the Eternal God, manifesting himself unto all nations

I can't find anything wrong with this conclusion, then:

The cost of this reenvisioned Mormonism is merely the loss of the Mormon soul.

On an intellectual level, I have no idea why these people want to maintain the value of Mormonism; they seem rather to be doing nothing of value beyond accumulating pet-projects on their CVs through exploring their own cultural anxieties (if sincere) or (if insincere) signalling their woke status through faddish pseudo-intellectualism.

Nor, on an intellectual level (or even pseudo-intellectual level), can I imagine just what Paul Peterson imagines he has in his corner of the ring. Church-of-Jesus-Christ-of-Latter-day-Saints-ism's most notable intellectual and cultural contribution of the past decades has been to make one hour available to its most devout members for doing something else with their time.

Who is the winner of this debate, then? Well, the liberal Mormons will make you waste an hour of your time in muddling through their nonsense, which I think is less desirable than having an extra hour of time to do something else (and no one awake who isn't woke is going to give that hour to reading Adam Miller).

Therefore, because time is more valuable than verbiage, I hereby declare Church-of-Jesus-Christ-of-Latter-day-Saints-ism the winner and Paul Peterson the victor.

[_Gadianton]

Lol, I can't say you're wrong about a lot of this stuff being cringe worthy, and I think it goes without saying that none of it registers as credible commentary on Chapel Mormonism.

To be fair to the new MI though, I think we should hold something like a bishop's interview before proceeding with commentary about their work:

1) Is critical theory rubbish?

If yes, then no need to move on to question two. Most people who have a vague idea about it would probably answer "yes". I would answer "maybe".

2) Can postmodern theory and Marxism etc. illuminate gospel topics?

With rare exception, I would answer "no". I think most active members, including Church leaders would answer somewhere between "no" and "hell no".

3) Can Mormon Pomo studies make BYU academically acceptable to religious scholars, and if so could this help the church, and-or can this work help liberalize church policy and image in badly needed ways?

I'd answer that it's likely.

Sorry, but to make this like a real bishop's interview, I have to ask at least one complex question that's poorly worded and possibly not even consistent.

My takeaway from Cuz' is that he'd answer "no" to question 1. Therefore, it's really pointless for him to spend time on question two, and the real issue for his audience is probably question three. If the Mopologists wish to get back into the graces of the leaders, then they need to take a long and hard look at the practical benefits of Mormon Studies. If there are serious reasons to believe they're liable to damage the Church's image, then an article in that direction may do them some good. They should seriously be thinking about things like, will the Ghost Committee hypothesis help the Church get academic credibility better than pscyhoanalysis and deconstruction?

Since The Interpreter is presumably an academic venue, articles like this one are a bit circular: those who think postmodernism is a bunch of mumbo jumbo won't learn much by reading an article that points to swanky verbiage and calls it nonsense. This article might be better aligned with LDS Living, where Chapel Mormons are unaware of what's going on in Mormon academia and could be influenced in the direction of Mopologetics.

So I can't see the article as anything but a cheap shot, good for a round of laughs for the Mopologist insiders, but otherwise is quite pointless.

Thanks for chiming in, Symmachus, entertaining and penetrating as always, and it's a real lesson to the Interpreter that on this board, disagreements are allowed. Imagine how impossible it would be for an article critical of the Ghost Committee to get past "peer review" over there.

[_Symmachus]

Gad, the Church would certainly be more interesting if bishops conducted interviews like that (if Oaks had his way, they'd probably have something along these lines asked of certain kinds of members every now and then).

I'm not sure critical theory (I won't bother defining the term for now) qua theory is rubbish, but most attempts to apply it sure are, and I'd bet someone like Adorno would oppose the attempt to apply anything. The applied rubbish seems to be most prevalent in "studies" fields, particularly when those fields aren't structured disciplines and anything can—indeed must—fill the void, so it should be no surprise that it leads to rubbish in Mormon Studies.

My first impression was that this Peterson thing is a case of Star Wars vs. Star Trek: a debate of no value to anyone but the participants, and even for them the only value to be derived is the mere fact that there is a debate at all.

But you're surely right to point out the function of Peterson's "review," and it shows the Interpreters are up to their usual game of policing other (formerly known as) Mormons. Although they're maintaining the Index of Forbidden Books, it must sting to know that their imprimatur doesn't come on the institutional letterhead as it once did. The stakes of the debate might be higher, then, on second thought.

If you'll indulge me, who am but a humble hanger-on at Cassius, I must dissent slightly, on third thought, although I shall do so with requisite humility and gratitude, Dean Robbers. I do not believe that the new MI is serving the Church's interests in an active way, or even BYU's. I have no doubt that the participants in the whole thing believe, irritatingly, that they are helping the Church, but in terms of BYU and the Church, they are simply permitted. To be more precise, they are merely tolerated. In terms of function, the vanguard of Mormon post-colonialism over at the MI is not really that different from the Old Guard—which is to say, they have no function.

I am a latecomer and a novice in the study of Mormon apologia, but in my limited understanding, there are two general explanations for what happened in 2012: 1) anticipating Greg Smith's hit-piece, Dehlin was able to get someone high up to intervene and quash it, which resulted in getting rid of Dan Peterson and his group, or 2) the Church and BYU were getting embarrassed by the antics of Peterson and his group, and used the Dehlin affair to clean house.

I think both of these are incorrect, as they misunderstand the logic of hierarchy, which is basically that if you're not at the top you don't matter. The people running the Church are not really susceptible to negative publicity unless they lead to lawsuits—God's true Church doesn't conform to the demands of the world—they are just annoyed by it in the way that all self-important people are annoyed by scoffers, so I reject narrative 2). Nor do I think the Church has any genuine liberal impulses—they're not going to protect one member who wants to speak his/her mind from other members who don't want to hear it—and they clearly have no sympathy with Dehlin's positions in general, so I reject 1) as well. For god's sake, the Church takes its own members to court over the use of the word "Mormon."

And I think this extends to BYU: no one who runs that place takes a genuinely liberal view of their religion, and BYU administrators do not really care about its scholarly reputation (it has none anyway). I'm not even sure they care that much about rankings, unlike almost every other college/university in America, since they don't need to attract students and their money, which is the whole point of playing the rankings game; the Church provides both. The only thing they care about is accreditation, because that is the way to access government money (using the students as the mechanism by which to draw from that account). I've never heard of a church or a university that will risk losing free money.

Institutionally speaking (not referring to a specific person), as a point of comparison BYU is barely troubled by sexual assault; it is the potential problems with Title IX compliance that led to changes in the Honor Code policies, not interests of justice. So, I can't believe BYU was all that concerned with something as institutionally insignificant as the non-scholarly hack-job operation that Peterson was leading—nothing they did could ever put BYU in legal jeopardy.

Little people who are not really members of the hierarchy used to assume (and often still do) that what occupies the majority of people—Joseph Smith, Book of Abraham, Book of Mormon, Church History—are also concerns of the hierarchy. But the tops of hierarchies are always up to something else, and as it turns out, the LDS hierarchy doesn't think much about any of these things, since its members are busy with, for example, training videos for Hmong-speaking bishops (to emphasize, their concern is with the videos more than the bishops).

What happened, in my view, is that the FARMSians were victims to bureaucratic inertia and the indifference that results from this, and above all victims to their chief folly, which is that they forgot the main rule of any hierarchy: stay in your place. The Church is a big bureaucracy that is always busy on important things like making the LDS apps interface with Sinhalese fonts and developing training materials to help bishops in Sudan use some Church-produced software to encourage self-reliance among the members there, who can simply access the software on their smart phones while on their way to get water from the well. Consequently, it ignores almost everything that goes on among the population, which is largely self-policing anyway, and if it needs some information, it hires a third party to initiate a survey, which in turn will be another committee project with more meetings and emails (or memos, if involving the older apostles).

Dehlin was a special case, though, because he had been personally involved with an apostle and had a mass audience. Church leaders like Jeffrey Holland (who is no dodo and went to a pretty good school) and others who were aware of him surely had their own way and timeline for dealing with Dehlin, as hindsight makes clear. Dehlin whipped up some publicity with his whining, but at the end of the day, some of the important people in the hierarchy probably wondered just who the hell Greg Smith is, and who the hell he thinks he is, while the others probably wondered just who the John Dehlin is, and who the hell he thinks he is. I'd wager that was the depth of their engagement in 2012. You get a sense of how deeply they were involved from this fact: months after John Dehlin's much publicized excommunication in 2015, a presentation was made to the apostles in which it was finally explained to them, half of whom are on the BYU board of trustees, just who the hell John Dehlin was.

Bradford had his own agenda, and whatever it was, it didn't involve the FARMSians. He was probably looking for anything he could use to get Peterson out, and the Greg Smith fiasco provided him cover. It wasn't that anyone who really mattered in the hierarchy was concerned about the MI, either because it was embarrassing or because they were trying to protect John Dehlin. It was just that neither John Dehlin nor Daniel Peterson matter enough to intervene when you're chairing a committee tasked with revising the seminary and institute materials for Latter-day Saints in Malta (who only exist on paper). With weighty matters like that before you, the differences that are passionately argued between the present Maxwell Institute and the Mormon Interpreter are almost imperceptible and look like a debate between fans of Star Wars and fans of Star Trek. In that context, Bradford could get his way.

[_Kishkumen]

Excellent discussion, gentlemen. I don't have the time to respond to it all in detail, but I would like to raise a few points. First, if that passage of Hickman is representative of the whole, then there are real reasons to question the piece. If the Book of Mormon is to be salvaged from its colonial past, then this is not the way to do it. One cannot simply deny what is on the page; colonialism is riven throughout the text. Something much more daring, and yet credible, is required. It starts with admitting that the vision of the relationship between peoples in the the book is a 19th century construct. It proceeds by arguing that a subversive reading of that construct is absolutely necessary.

Unfortunately, both of these things are non-starters at BYU. Apparently this results in blinkered attempts to read the text in a completely contradictory way. I will withhold judgment until I read the piece in its entirety, but I will say that the quoted passage is very concerning.

I agree with my esteemed colleague, Prof. Symmachus, in his overall sense of how much the Brethren as a whole knew about and were involved in the whole Dehlin/FARMS debacle. Yes, the Q12 had to be briefed on Dehlin's identity long after he was ex-communicated. Let's pause, however, to give that one a little more thought. The Brethren were briefed about Dehlin because many of them were either unaware or at least not completely aware of who Dehlin was or what he was up to.

That said, some of them almost certainly did know. And this is how it has been for some time. There have been the real attack dog apostles like Packer, on the one hand, and the majority who are too busy and not really interested in policing the church for orthodoxy and complete obedience with such fervor and dedication. The "Watchmen" were involved in the process and probably knew something of the FARMS side of the argument. Holland is probably not one of the Watchmen. Dehlin invoked his help, and that may have saved Dehlin's bacon on the ecclesiastical side for a time.

The problem for the FARMSians is that the Brethren tend to interfere with BYU as little as possible when it comes to internal issues like the organization of colleges, departments, and research entities. Their other problem was that they had amassed a fair amount of disrespect and downright dislike from fellow BYU faculty members and lower level admins. There was little of what they did that had a place in a modern university. FARMS was more like an Institute of Creation Science at some far-right evangelical college. Very few LDS academics are so far gone intellectually that they would countenance that sort of thing if given the power and opportunity to do something about it. So, yes, the death of FARMS was really an internal affair at BYU, and the Watchmen felt they could do very little to keep it from happening.

There is no way that the FARMSians did not contact their friends in the Q12 to let them know what was going on. There is no way that the Committee for the Strengthening of the Membership did not know who John Dehlin was. I do not believe that we can take the postgame briefing on the Dehlin problem as evidence of complete ignorance of the Dehlin/FARMS fight or the end of FARMS at BYU. Instead, it was probably a briefing on the continuing problem of Mormon Stories, which the excommunication of Dehlin did not quash.

[_MrStakhanovite]

Dean Robbers,

This is has turned out to be a fascinating find; I’ve never encountered Paul C. Peterson to my knowledge before and ended up enjoying this piece. For example I was bowled over by this remark about Adam Miller:

Unfortunately, the essay never gets any clearer. Miller loves to remind his readers that he is a philosopher (he does so twice in the first three pages of this essay). And it is true, but he is an academic philosopher and not a Socrates.

How are we to understand our assigned Mormon interpreter in this passage? There are so many plausible meanings to this throwaway remark that it could entail any number of things, yet I feel that just behind these words we can make out the sounds of Paul physically straining to make something obvious to his readers by ostension.

Socrates does belong to that 200 or so year period between Jeremiah and Plato where a Mediterranean philosophical tradition makes philosophical inquiry dependent on divine assistance. Take a look here at what Plato attributes to Socrates after he has been sentenced to death in the ‘Apology’ 40a (G.M.A. Grube translation):

At all previous times my familiar prophetic power, my spiritual manifestation frequently opposed me, even in small matters, when I was about to do something wrong, but now that, as you can see for yourselves, I was faced with what one might think, and what is generally thought to be, the worst of evils, my divine sign has not opposed me, either when I left home at dawn, or when I came into court, or at any time that I was about to say something during my speech. Yet in other talks it often held me back in the middle of my speaking, but now it has opposed no word or deed of mine. What do I think is the reason for this? I will tell you. What has happened to me may well be a good thing, and those of us who believe death to be an evil are certainly mistaken. I have convincing proof of this, for it is impossible that my familiar sign did not oppose me if I was not about to do what was right.

Is Paul telling us that that Adam Miller has nothing comparable to Socrates’ prophetic powers? Are we to take Paul to be saying that Adam Miller ignores divine promptings while he is engaged in philosophy? Is this Paul’s way of telling us that Socrates’ career should be seen as normative for Mormons when it comes to philosophy?

It could be the case that the important distinction is in the “academic” descriptor. Socrates was never remunerated for his discussions but it is well known that Sophists most certainly were. Is this a comment about Adam Miller earning a living by teaching philosophy in Higher Education? Paul himself spent 34 good years teaching American government and political philosophy in South Carolina, so perhaps it is a veiled condemnation of the current state of affairs in philosophy departments across the English speaking world and Continental Europe? Is Adam Miller being accused of engaging in sophistry?

It isn’t inconceivable that “academic” is a reference to the school of thought known as “academic skepticism” in Hellenistic philosophy. Certainly this would be compatible with the intriguing parable of the college freshman:

Reading this essay reminds me of a story I used to share in many of the classes I taught. A young college freshman returned home for Christmas at the end of his first semester, a semester in which he had an introductory English course where he was taught “critical thinking,” an introductory sociology course where he was taught about the social construction of reality, and an introductory philosophy class where he learned about his place in the “space state.” When he arrives at home, his mother hands him a glass of water. He says (without a thank you), “This is a glass of water. Or is it a glass of water? And if it is a glass of water, why is it a glass of water?” Shocked, the mother is befuddled at what has happened to her son.

What immediately jumped out to me was the prompt integration of Manuel DeLanda’s terminology of “space state” into a story that was told to Paul’s students prior to the publication of the anthology under review. I had never heard of Manuel DeLanda before clicking on this thread and so I had to resort to some googling to find out that DeLanda is a lecturer in architecture who has a deep interest in Francophone philosophy. Did Paul have an experience of encountering s young ἐφεκτικοί fresh from his/her Philosophy 101 course learned in the ways of DeLanda? Or perhaps this is a kind of anachronism that was deliberately placed in the text to signal to us that Paul knows Adam Miller’s kind and that he has Adam Miller’s number.

Peterson’s efforts to rip off the mask of intellectual respectability Old Testament the Maxwell Institute to reveal the grotesque features below is certainly reminiscent Homer Duncan’s work for Missionary Crusader.



I think Wyatt deserves our thanks for making sure this essay saw the light of day!

[cacheman]

The key to Peterson's essay is the quote from 2 Nephi. It seems to really offend him that anyone would dare to discuss Mormonism without assessing its spiritual component. His thesis appears to be that, if you ignore the spiritual, you are doomed to spouting useless gibberish (oh, and the Maxwell Institute, sucks, too). Being unfamiliar with Manuel DeLanda, I'm still intrigued by Adam Miller's statement that as “a philosopher, then, what I’m interested in is not just Mormonism’s actual position (Mormonism as a point in space), or even Mormonism’s potential (Mormonism as a specific temporal vector, historical or projected), but this deeper category that shapes them both. I want to know what Mormonism can do. I want to grasp the virtual state space that maps Mormonism’s field of action.” Leaving the terminology aside, where is Miller going with this? What is his thesis? What does he think "Mormonism can do"? Peterson is too busy dismissing Miller to tell us anything about it, and that's a shame. But, of course, Peterson's objective is to dismiss and ridicule these folks, so why bother talking about the substance of Miller's essay?

That said, I can't disagree with his assessment of Jared Hickman, although once again I note that we really don't get a sense of what Hickman is talking about. There are two possibilities: Peterson doesn't understand Hickman, or he's more interested in making a point. I'm thinking the latter. If, however, Hickman really is saying that, for lack of a better term, Mormonism deconstructs itself, so "its faithful readers will honor and sustain Native peoples without the missionary agenda or ethnocentric paternalism found within secular history," well, that's just absurd wishful thinking.

As for Mason, I'm as puzzled as anyone else why Peterson is upset by this statement: “With eternity as its backdrop, Mormonism is a religion … that could meaningfully converse with modern philosophies and ideologies from transcendentalism to liberalism to Marxism.” One would think a committed Latter-day Saint (or whatever they're calling themselves these days) would applaud the notion that Mormonism (yes, it is an ideology, obviously) can hold its own with any other philosophical or ideological school of thought, though that, too, may be a bit of wishful thinking.

It's in the last section of the essay that we get to what's really bothering Peterson: a perceived prejudice against apologetics:

"I see two problems with Birch’s project. First, it presumes that heretofore apologetic scholarship has not contributed in academically productive ways. Second, so-called “critical methodologies” take many forms, but they tend to share a largely unexamined bias of reductionism of one type or another. This bias tends to prevent those who hold it from taking most apologetics seriously."

Apparently, to folks like Peterson (and several commenters), projects such as the collection of essays on Bushman privilege academic approaches to Mormonism and dismiss apologetics as intellectually illegitimate. Thus it is not surprising that Peterson's thesis seems to be that academic approaches to Mormonism are "doomed to failure" and reflect the "fads and fashions of the moment." True to form, he casts "academic" and "science" as negative terms, often using scare quotes and italics to emphasize just how "off the rails" it is to discuss Mormonism without defending its spiritual value.

In short, Peterson's "review" seems more an attempt to stake out and defend an ideological position than it is an actual review. A decent review gives the reader some understanding of what the reviewed piece is about. There's none of that here. Granted, some of the stuff he quotes is rather cringe-worthy, but this is about as far from being a review as were the numerous FARMS reviews of Grant Palmer's book or Midgley's rant about my friend's essay on being nice to Mormons.

[_Kishkumen]

Runtu, very well said. If I may clumsily distill your comments into a brief observation: Readers of Peterson's review have walked into a spat between two factions of Mormon intellectuals, those often identified as apologists, and those who eschew traditional apologetics. Both sides see the other as destructive and, at the same time, doomed to failure and/or irrelevance.

Seen from that perspective, the whole thing looks kind of boring and pointless, unless you are one of the parties engaged in this war.

[_MrStakhanovite]

Prof. Symmachus,

On an intellectual level, I have no idea why these people want to maintain the value of Mormonism; they seem rather to be doing nothing of value beyond accumulating pet-projects on their CVs through exploring their own cultural anxieties (if sincere) or (if insincere) signalling their woke status through faddish pseudo-intellectualism.

Nor, on an intellectual level (or even pseudo-intellectual level), can I imagine just what Paul Peterson imagines he has in his corner of the ring. Church-of-Jesus-Christ-of-Latter-day-Saints-ism's most notable intellectual and cultural contribution of the past decades has been to make one hour available to its most devout members for doing something else with their time.

Who is the winner of this debate, then? Well, the liberal Mormons will make you waste an hour of your time in muddling through their nonsense, which I think is less desirable than having an extra hour of time to do something else (and no one awake who isn't woke is going to give that hour to reading Adam Miller).

Therefore, because time is more valuable than verbiage, I hereby declare Church-of-Jesus-Christ-of-Latter-day-Saints-ism the winner and Paul Peterson the victor.

It is fortuitous you broach this subject because it relates directly to the dissertation I’m defending next semester at Cassius. The central load bearing pillar of my thesis can be summed up as thus: Mormons are a people of the book that have forgotten how to read. My most important example of the previous principle is is an extended study of the ideological war being waged by both the classical Mormon apologists (Mopologists) and the Mormon neo-apologists (Neopogs). I would say that Paul C. Peterson is a Mopologist and Adam Miller is a Neopog respectively.

In my final analysis the Mopologist and the Neopog find themselves consciously embroiled in a war over the soul of the Brigamite Church there in Salt Lake City but that organization lost its soul before the first half of the 20th century was even over. What remains is a corporate husk that generates a noxious mixture of the Prosperity Gospel you find on the Trinity Broadcasting Network and the cracker barrel sapience of Dr. Phil. The war that Paul and Adam both participate in cannot be won anymore than two rival Sancho Panza’s can triumph over Quixote’s giants. They can certainly act victorious in their collaborative farce, but more importantly we can (and will) certainly gain something of value by observing this farce.

Now I flesh out a concept of “Mormon Illiteracy” as an arch with two extremes:


Mopologists find themselves on the right side of the arch and the Neopogs on the left side. Essentially the Mopologists can perform the functions of “application” very well which is why you find so many Mopologists skilled in languages and working in fields like law and engineering, but tend to be atrocious readers and are all but blind to things like context or subtext. Paul’s comment that Adam Miller ain’t no Socrates being an example of application totally lacking in comprehension.

Neopogs on the other hand exist on the other side of the Mormon Illiteracy arc, they tend to be skilled in understanding difficult texts but lack aptitude in trying to relate that text to another subject. If you’ve powered your way through Adam Miller’s ‘Letters to a Young Mormon’ you’ll know this disorienting experience and we watch poor Paul Peterson struggle with being bludgeoned by his own sense of mystification with Miller’s use of Manuel DeLanda.

I actually place Postmodernism proper in the middle of the Mormon Illiteracy arc, that hazy liminal stage where we see people equally balanced in their inability to grasp comprehension or application. Terryl Givens is our paragon here with his ‘Wrestling the Angel: The Foundations of Mormon Thought: Cosmos, God, Humanity’ which is like a nightmare inexplicably ripped from the pages of Lacan. The man is a professor of literature whose sweeping intellectual history of Mormon thought abandons any pretense of narrative and is instead arranged topically as if he drew inspiration from the LDS Bible Dictionary.