Connecting Some Apologetic Dots
Posted: Fri Aug 14, 2020 6:39 am
It'd been sometime since I'd listened to Mormon Stories; John Dehlin is a man of many talents, but his project is, by definition, more about personal stories than ideas and so just doesn't interest me except when the ideas people come on. When that happens, it's thrilling, and I don't care what anyone says: Dehlin is a good interviewer because he gets his guests to talk and keep talking.
The Ritner podcast is a watershed in Mormon history. The real meat, of course, is Ritner's edition of the Joseph Smith papyri, but this podcast is on par with the 1912 Spalding affair. What was notable about that was not Spalding's book, a collection of then current Egyptological opinion of the Book of Abraham, but rather its wide publication by the New York Times. As in all things to do with Mormons and publicity since Utah statehood, these big stories are only a momentary flash for the non-Mormon public and quickly forgotten, but that flash burns a deep scar, slow to heal, on the imagination of Mormons. The 1912 NYT stories basically removed the Book of Abraham even from Mormon view until the late 1960s. Even Nibley didn't write about the Book of Abraham until he was nearly retired (and the first he did write was an attack on the contributors to Spalding's book half a century earlier). The fake rediscovery of the papyri in the late 1960s inaugurated a train of apologetic activity that in turn conveyed a new confidence to the Church's attitude the Book of Abraham and by extension the Pearl of Great Price. It seems paradoxical now, but apologetics was quite successful on the Book of Abraham front for a few decades. Refutations were amateurish, and scholarly pushback was tepid. Certainly there was nothing comparable to Ritner’s lectures these past weeks. Back then, Nibley himself, as I understand it, would lecture the general authorities about the Book of Abraham and the Book of Moses; it's not the reason why the Church began a massive temple building program, but it is tempting to speculate on the influence of their nascent confidence, derived from Nibley's apologetics, in the development of this policy. I imagine some of those Church people felt a certain thrill from all of Nibley's meandering gobbledygook: all those Egyptian pictures towards the back of the book that kept you awake during many a sacrament meeting so much more than that; they were physical proof that you were managing something extending back to Abraham and up to Kolob (admittedly, only a few were physically and emotionally capable of experiencing a thrill). It is that same thrill that shot through all the baby boomer Nibley wannabes who graduated into FARMS and comfortable employment at BYU.
That era is officially over now. For good. It's been ending for more than fifteen years, obviously, but it has been a war of attrition, with skirmishes here and there in places that are obscure to most members (internet boards first, Dialogue—which no truly believing Mormon reads—FAIR presentations, and so on), but this feels different. On the Book of Abraham front, this is total victory. It is one thing to see bits and pieces of this in the amateurish CES letter, yet for all but a few with enough energy and interest to read Ritner's book or to do the kind of research that Shulem has done, there was also the small possibility that Gee or Muehelstein might have something. Not now, though. This is final. Ritner published all of this of course in his book and in his response to the Church's essay in 2014, but a podcast and Youtube video are going to get attention in a way that no other medium will: the rest were guerilla pin-prick campaigns with many casualties but this a final blow to the Book of Abraham because of the medium transmitting it. Nobody needs to watch or listen to all 9 hours; like the Spalding book in 1912, it will be enough to know that a top Egyptologist has said it's all nonsense and that there is a live link to Youtube where this professor who taught John Gee has ripped apart the entire Book of Abraham and all the essential apologetic arguments. It will serve the purpose that Nibley's books served but for a generation that doesn't read books (or anything, really). It's hard to imagine John Gee mustering a response to this; he himself essentially conceded defeat back in 2018, as I noted at the time (on this thread), and it's telling that his latest book has nothing to do with Mormon scripture at all.
Instead it's about identity maintenance, arguing basically that people who leave the Church are just bad and the way to keep people in is to get them more committed to the Church. Maintaining that Mormon identity, and narrowing it down, is the solution he implies. He may be right. I was initially unsure why John Gee decided that he was a sociologist and wrote this book. It's hard not to see it as a sign that he had failed as an Egyptologist in so far that his Egyptological work wasn't helping the cause—but why this topic? Added to that, the recent discussion here about Kwaku and Hanna Seariac (I prefer Syriac, but whatever) and the sense expressed here that they represent a new crop of apologist on the verge of ripening was something I found equally confusing. Kwaku seems like an affable and entertaining person, but he clearly is not motivated by intellectual concerns. His primary apologetic seems to be that he is Mormon, and that having a Mormon identity is great. Hannah Seariac seems on the surface more concerned with ideas, but scanning her Twitter feed it becomes quite clear that ideas like the Trueness of the Church are vehicles for traditionalist identitarianism. The buzz around her here led me to the FAIR podcast, the first I'd ever listened to, where the only lively conversation (i.e. more than "I totally agree") with John Gee was about the distinction between "prog Mos" and progressives. Unfortunately, this never developed into a discussion of the ideas supposedly motivating them. But I was struck too by John Gee's obvious interest in categorizing people according to identities; it seemed vaguely identitarian too.
I have said here for a long time that Mormon apologetics after Nibley never developed any new ideas. It is an idea-less exercise in imitation of the Master (that is, Nibley) in terms of style (be a dick) and approach (anything roughly old that Joseph didn't know proves the Church is true). But unlike him they never developed a wider vision of Mormonism to advance. Their vision is much more limited because their horizon extends little beyond the act of being a BYU professor in Provo, Utah. That's the end goal. Daniel Peterson does not appear ever to have had an original thought, but it's difficult to discern his shallowness as unique because hardly any of the others have either; he is conspicuous because he is an impresario of apologetics, but not a practitioner. The practitioners are even duller. I have a hard time even calling them "apologists" because classical apologists that come to my mind didn't fend off attacks through mere rhetorical games and (at best) focusing on irrelevant details; no, writers like Tertullian or Justin Martyr or even Hugh Nibley actually offered ideas to replace their opponents'. It was more offensive than defensive. Nibley's whole vision of the ancient world is just so much more interesting than that of many academic historians, let alone his vision of Mormonism. The effect of reading Nibley after a long stretch is almost that you feel his version of Mormonism better explains this or that feature of the ancient world. It may be totally wrong, but that's beside the point I'm making; he wasn't simply brushing off attacks but actually attempting to displace the contemporary intellectual orthodoxies around him. Mormonism was a grand key that explained things. He was an unyielding traditionalist in his Mormonism but he was not intellectually reactionary. Not so his successors. But what do those successors have in common with Kwaku and Seariac? What makes them all apologists?
Forgive me my limited understanding, for I"m sure it's obvious to those who have studied apologetics as a social phenomenon much more deeply than I, but to my thinking identitarianism is a symptom of intellectual hollowness; it's what fills the void caused by an absence of ideas. People need to live their lives in stories because that is how we orient ourselves in the world, and ideas are the beginnings of story. A myth is a vehicle for an idea, but when you have no ideas, identity becomes the vehicle for a myth. People resort to a form of tribalism where identity takes the place of ideas, or at least where identity becomes paramount and any idea is merely a tool subordinate and subservient to the identity or where the identity and idea become indistinguishable. This is phenomenon observable almost everywhere in the culture now, which is one of the reasons I am skeptical of claims that ideas are behind, for example, the current iconoclastic movement in the urban United States. No one loots an Apple Store because they are motivated by some idea. But such criminality, interestingly, is justified by appealing to identity. To me it is a sign that ideas (expressed as myths) that once structured the social order have disappeared. I don't know whether it is a symptom or a cause, but it is certainly a sign of fast crumbling social cohesion.
I wonder if Mormons apologetics is not following a similar course. If so, it wouldn't be the only part of Mormonism going this way. It is not for nothing, perhaps, that the most prominent Mormon space outside of the Church itself is something called "Mormon Stories," a place predicated not on any idea about Mormonism but merely the identity of being or having been Mormon. Or consider the Snufferites, people who explicitly reject the Church because it no longer sustains its own myths; they are right about that, because the Church as I knew it growing up was largely a managerial mechanism, and it seems even more so now from what I can tell. Their ideas are whacky but they seem more interested in those ideas than in simply being Mormon for the sake of being Mormon. Whatever ideas Mormonism contains, you don't hear much about them at General Conference. But I think apologetics ran out of ideas even before Nibley died, and it is about that time that FARMS (and then Maxwell Institute) shifted their approach to identity maintenance. The collapse of the distinction between the idea and the identity associated with the idea is what fueled the hostile tone: attacking a claim made by the Church was equivalent to attacking them. Nibley could be a dick, but he was mostly dismissive, and one of the most revealing facts about his attitude towards disagreemtn was that he was close friends with Klaus Baer (as well as all kinds of apostates and other unsavories throughout his life). Baer was an intellectual antagonist, not a personal one. Compare their relationship to John Gee (Nibley's successor) and Robert Ritner (Baer's successor), and you see the shift I mean. Gee and his compatriots see Ritner not as attacking the Book of Abraham but as attacking the Church at the center of their identity, but that is not how Nibley viewed Baer. Nor did Nibley write screeds against fellow Mormons as such (with one famous exception), nor about lukewarm Mormons or liberal Mormons because he was not policing what being a Mormon was; that is, he was not busying himself in Mormon identity maintenance. His successors, however, having been making that their primary activity for a long time now, even when it seemed like they were doing traditional FARMSian scholarship—what other way is there to see their attacks on amateur archaeologists who think that the Nephites lived a little south of Chicago rather than Costa Rica? One or two posts about the faults of the "Heartland Model" look like a conceptual disagreement; 10+ involving reviews by four people over a single book (actually, merely the commentary in the book), and you start to think something else is going on.
The lack of ideas in apologetics has resulted in a project deformed from the original apologetic goals of Nibley. Rather than advancing Mormonism, the new goal is to project Mormon identity (as Kwaku does) and to delineate it (as Seariac and Smoot do). The older apologists have been doing this for a while though in a subtler form. Come to think of it, that is hardly different from what the new MI has been doing, too. I dislike liberal Mormons because I think that, beneath their inclusive rhetoric and chummy demeanor, they are a more sophisticated form of identitarian—the only reason any of them stay in the Church is because they have a Mormon identity but it's hard to find one who believes the claims made by the Church or takes them seriously—and they strike me as authoritarian and boringly careerist: what is an original idea that has come out of anything they have done? All they do is update Mormonism to whatever the latest academic trend is. But these "progmos" aren't a threat because of any idea they have; they are threat because their view of Mormon identity is so broad as to be meaningless, which is in effect the denial of someone like Hannah Seariac.
They will still do ancient stuff that Joseph couldn't have known about, but it will be ancillary and vestigial. Apologetics will be on the offensive again, but to judge from Seariac, Kwaku, and Smoot, it will be primarily about advancing a particular version of Mormon identity, and it will have a different target. Ritner's podcast on the Book of Abraham isn't as emotionally satisfying as Jenkins' takedown of the Book of Mormon, but I think its effects will go much deeper, because from here on out the apologists are going to go for easier targets. John Gee obviously feels Jana Riess is much easier than Robert Ritner, which is to say that "easier targets" means other Mormons. So I can't help but wonder if this is all that we're going to get from the apologists from here on out, and whether this shift to a blatantly identitarian apologetics portends a breakdown of social cohesion within the Church.
The Ritner podcast is a watershed in Mormon history. The real meat, of course, is Ritner's edition of the Joseph Smith papyri, but this podcast is on par with the 1912 Spalding affair. What was notable about that was not Spalding's book, a collection of then current Egyptological opinion of the Book of Abraham, but rather its wide publication by the New York Times. As in all things to do with Mormons and publicity since Utah statehood, these big stories are only a momentary flash for the non-Mormon public and quickly forgotten, but that flash burns a deep scar, slow to heal, on the imagination of Mormons. The 1912 NYT stories basically removed the Book of Abraham even from Mormon view until the late 1960s. Even Nibley didn't write about the Book of Abraham until he was nearly retired (and the first he did write was an attack on the contributors to Spalding's book half a century earlier). The fake rediscovery of the papyri in the late 1960s inaugurated a train of apologetic activity that in turn conveyed a new confidence to the Church's attitude the Book of Abraham and by extension the Pearl of Great Price. It seems paradoxical now, but apologetics was quite successful on the Book of Abraham front for a few decades. Refutations were amateurish, and scholarly pushback was tepid. Certainly there was nothing comparable to Ritner’s lectures these past weeks. Back then, Nibley himself, as I understand it, would lecture the general authorities about the Book of Abraham and the Book of Moses; it's not the reason why the Church began a massive temple building program, but it is tempting to speculate on the influence of their nascent confidence, derived from Nibley's apologetics, in the development of this policy. I imagine some of those Church people felt a certain thrill from all of Nibley's meandering gobbledygook: all those Egyptian pictures towards the back of the book that kept you awake during many a sacrament meeting so much more than that; they were physical proof that you were managing something extending back to Abraham and up to Kolob (admittedly, only a few were physically and emotionally capable of experiencing a thrill). It is that same thrill that shot through all the baby boomer Nibley wannabes who graduated into FARMS and comfortable employment at BYU.
That era is officially over now. For good. It's been ending for more than fifteen years, obviously, but it has been a war of attrition, with skirmishes here and there in places that are obscure to most members (internet boards first, Dialogue—which no truly believing Mormon reads—FAIR presentations, and so on), but this feels different. On the Book of Abraham front, this is total victory. It is one thing to see bits and pieces of this in the amateurish CES letter, yet for all but a few with enough energy and interest to read Ritner's book or to do the kind of research that Shulem has done, there was also the small possibility that Gee or Muehelstein might have something. Not now, though. This is final. Ritner published all of this of course in his book and in his response to the Church's essay in 2014, but a podcast and Youtube video are going to get attention in a way that no other medium will: the rest were guerilla pin-prick campaigns with many casualties but this a final blow to the Book of Abraham because of the medium transmitting it. Nobody needs to watch or listen to all 9 hours; like the Spalding book in 1912, it will be enough to know that a top Egyptologist has said it's all nonsense and that there is a live link to Youtube where this professor who taught John Gee has ripped apart the entire Book of Abraham and all the essential apologetic arguments. It will serve the purpose that Nibley's books served but for a generation that doesn't read books (or anything, really). It's hard to imagine John Gee mustering a response to this; he himself essentially conceded defeat back in 2018, as I noted at the time (on this thread), and it's telling that his latest book has nothing to do with Mormon scripture at all.
Instead it's about identity maintenance, arguing basically that people who leave the Church are just bad and the way to keep people in is to get them more committed to the Church. Maintaining that Mormon identity, and narrowing it down, is the solution he implies. He may be right. I was initially unsure why John Gee decided that he was a sociologist and wrote this book. It's hard not to see it as a sign that he had failed as an Egyptologist in so far that his Egyptological work wasn't helping the cause—but why this topic? Added to that, the recent discussion here about Kwaku and Hanna Seariac (I prefer Syriac, but whatever) and the sense expressed here that they represent a new crop of apologist on the verge of ripening was something I found equally confusing. Kwaku seems like an affable and entertaining person, but he clearly is not motivated by intellectual concerns. His primary apologetic seems to be that he is Mormon, and that having a Mormon identity is great. Hannah Seariac seems on the surface more concerned with ideas, but scanning her Twitter feed it becomes quite clear that ideas like the Trueness of the Church are vehicles for traditionalist identitarianism. The buzz around her here led me to the FAIR podcast, the first I'd ever listened to, where the only lively conversation (i.e. more than "I totally agree") with John Gee was about the distinction between "prog Mos" and progressives. Unfortunately, this never developed into a discussion of the ideas supposedly motivating them. But I was struck too by John Gee's obvious interest in categorizing people according to identities; it seemed vaguely identitarian too.
I have said here for a long time that Mormon apologetics after Nibley never developed any new ideas. It is an idea-less exercise in imitation of the Master (that is, Nibley) in terms of style (be a dick) and approach (anything roughly old that Joseph didn't know proves the Church is true). But unlike him they never developed a wider vision of Mormonism to advance. Their vision is much more limited because their horizon extends little beyond the act of being a BYU professor in Provo, Utah. That's the end goal. Daniel Peterson does not appear ever to have had an original thought, but it's difficult to discern his shallowness as unique because hardly any of the others have either; he is conspicuous because he is an impresario of apologetics, but not a practitioner. The practitioners are even duller. I have a hard time even calling them "apologists" because classical apologists that come to my mind didn't fend off attacks through mere rhetorical games and (at best) focusing on irrelevant details; no, writers like Tertullian or Justin Martyr or even Hugh Nibley actually offered ideas to replace their opponents'. It was more offensive than defensive. Nibley's whole vision of the ancient world is just so much more interesting than that of many academic historians, let alone his vision of Mormonism. The effect of reading Nibley after a long stretch is almost that you feel his version of Mormonism better explains this or that feature of the ancient world. It may be totally wrong, but that's beside the point I'm making; he wasn't simply brushing off attacks but actually attempting to displace the contemporary intellectual orthodoxies around him. Mormonism was a grand key that explained things. He was an unyielding traditionalist in his Mormonism but he was not intellectually reactionary. Not so his successors. But what do those successors have in common with Kwaku and Seariac? What makes them all apologists?
Forgive me my limited understanding, for I"m sure it's obvious to those who have studied apologetics as a social phenomenon much more deeply than I, but to my thinking identitarianism is a symptom of intellectual hollowness; it's what fills the void caused by an absence of ideas. People need to live their lives in stories because that is how we orient ourselves in the world, and ideas are the beginnings of story. A myth is a vehicle for an idea, but when you have no ideas, identity becomes the vehicle for a myth. People resort to a form of tribalism where identity takes the place of ideas, or at least where identity becomes paramount and any idea is merely a tool subordinate and subservient to the identity or where the identity and idea become indistinguishable. This is phenomenon observable almost everywhere in the culture now, which is one of the reasons I am skeptical of claims that ideas are behind, for example, the current iconoclastic movement in the urban United States. No one loots an Apple Store because they are motivated by some idea. But such criminality, interestingly, is justified by appealing to identity. To me it is a sign that ideas (expressed as myths) that once structured the social order have disappeared. I don't know whether it is a symptom or a cause, but it is certainly a sign of fast crumbling social cohesion.
I wonder if Mormons apologetics is not following a similar course. If so, it wouldn't be the only part of Mormonism going this way. It is not for nothing, perhaps, that the most prominent Mormon space outside of the Church itself is something called "Mormon Stories," a place predicated not on any idea about Mormonism but merely the identity of being or having been Mormon. Or consider the Snufferites, people who explicitly reject the Church because it no longer sustains its own myths; they are right about that, because the Church as I knew it growing up was largely a managerial mechanism, and it seems even more so now from what I can tell. Their ideas are whacky but they seem more interested in those ideas than in simply being Mormon for the sake of being Mormon. Whatever ideas Mormonism contains, you don't hear much about them at General Conference. But I think apologetics ran out of ideas even before Nibley died, and it is about that time that FARMS (and then Maxwell Institute) shifted their approach to identity maintenance. The collapse of the distinction between the idea and the identity associated with the idea is what fueled the hostile tone: attacking a claim made by the Church was equivalent to attacking them. Nibley could be a dick, but he was mostly dismissive, and one of the most revealing facts about his attitude towards disagreemtn was that he was close friends with Klaus Baer (as well as all kinds of apostates and other unsavories throughout his life). Baer was an intellectual antagonist, not a personal one. Compare their relationship to John Gee (Nibley's successor) and Robert Ritner (Baer's successor), and you see the shift I mean. Gee and his compatriots see Ritner not as attacking the Book of Abraham but as attacking the Church at the center of their identity, but that is not how Nibley viewed Baer. Nor did Nibley write screeds against fellow Mormons as such (with one famous exception), nor about lukewarm Mormons or liberal Mormons because he was not policing what being a Mormon was; that is, he was not busying himself in Mormon identity maintenance. His successors, however, having been making that their primary activity for a long time now, even when it seemed like they were doing traditional FARMSian scholarship—what other way is there to see their attacks on amateur archaeologists who think that the Nephites lived a little south of Chicago rather than Costa Rica? One or two posts about the faults of the "Heartland Model" look like a conceptual disagreement; 10+ involving reviews by four people over a single book (actually, merely the commentary in the book), and you start to think something else is going on.
The lack of ideas in apologetics has resulted in a project deformed from the original apologetic goals of Nibley. Rather than advancing Mormonism, the new goal is to project Mormon identity (as Kwaku does) and to delineate it (as Seariac and Smoot do). The older apologists have been doing this for a while though in a subtler form. Come to think of it, that is hardly different from what the new MI has been doing, too. I dislike liberal Mormons because I think that, beneath their inclusive rhetoric and chummy demeanor, they are a more sophisticated form of identitarian—the only reason any of them stay in the Church is because they have a Mormon identity but it's hard to find one who believes the claims made by the Church or takes them seriously—and they strike me as authoritarian and boringly careerist: what is an original idea that has come out of anything they have done? All they do is update Mormonism to whatever the latest academic trend is. But these "progmos" aren't a threat because of any idea they have; they are threat because their view of Mormon identity is so broad as to be meaningless, which is in effect the denial of someone like Hannah Seariac.
They will still do ancient stuff that Joseph couldn't have known about, but it will be ancillary and vestigial. Apologetics will be on the offensive again, but to judge from Seariac, Kwaku, and Smoot, it will be primarily about advancing a particular version of Mormon identity, and it will have a different target. Ritner's podcast on the Book of Abraham isn't as emotionally satisfying as Jenkins' takedown of the Book of Mormon, but I think its effects will go much deeper, because from here on out the apologists are going to go for easier targets. John Gee obviously feels Jana Riess is much easier than Robert Ritner, which is to say that "easier targets" means other Mormons. So I can't help but wonder if this is all that we're going to get from the apologists from here on out, and whether this shift to a blatantly identitarian apologetics portends a breakdown of social cohesion within the Church.