The latest Interpreter article is intellectually dishonest...

[Gadianton]

I enjoyed the OP. Another thoroughly dishonest article from Interpreter. The thing is, who are they trying to convince? Nobody outside of TBMs and apologists are going to find it the least bit convincing. Is this is some in-group thing, where they're all trying to score points with their group by outdoing each other in terms of nonsense? We can think of churches like businesses. Nobody is going to let another business come screaming through their turf with aggressive tactics and not say anything about it. I had a lot of big journal keepers in my family and the way they bash other churches as inept, ignorant, or evil is pretty humorous. People aren't anti-Mormon any more than they are anti-Kirby vacuum.

[Limnor]

Is there a polite way to say they’re tricking people?

Douglas is not an apologist, I’m not even sure that he’s Mormon. His self description is “historian and writer”. Which makes the piece of Mormon propaganda that he’s produced for Interpreter even more inexplicable. He’s a better scholar than what he’s shown in this article, surely?

I did a quick look through his other Interpreter article that can be found here. It was much better, but did contain another significant sleight of hand in that in he redefines what the term “High Church” means in order to conclude that “Latter-day Saint theology is fundamentally high-church.” That conclusion is core to his article, and so it’s a significant piece of smoke and mirrors.

Now I’m even more puzzled. The article, as I read it, has an apologetic spin toward the Mormon side.

Briefly looking at Douglas’ background, his interest is in minority religions, and from that view it could be interpreted that Douglas is defending marginalized groups, with Mormonism being just one of many, and his thesis is that most opposition can be reduced to prejudice.

The article wobbles between treating opposition as prejudice and treating it as legitimate disagreement, without ever fully engaging the claims. Frankly I’m unsure of the intent.

I’ll check out the other works.

[Limnor]

I wasn’t able to determine Douglas’s personal religious commitments, though I did come across a single mention of pagan alignment. I think that alignment, if it’s an accurate assessment, may influence his approach to Mormonism as a minority Christian experience in England—I’m leaning toward an assessment that Douglas is engaging in ecumenical dialogue. I’m wondering what his thoughts are about hermetic and folk magic influence on Mormonism.

All that said, I’m with gad in that I don’t see the end state of his engagement and publication in Interpreter.

Plus it’s not very good.

[I Have Questions]

I wasn’t able to determine Douglas’s personal religious commitments, though I did come across a single mention of pagan alignment. I think that alignment, if it’s an accurate assessment, may influence his approach to Mormonism as a minority Christian experience in England—I’m leaning toward an assessment that Douglas is engaging in ecumenical dialogue. I’m wondering what his thoughts are about hermetic and folk magic influence on Mormonism.

All that said, I’m with gad in that I don’t see the end state of his engagement and publication in Interpreter.

Plus its not very good.

It's not very good "history" or "scholarship". It's purely an apologetic argument designed from the outset to present the false conclusion that during 1837 and 1842 in Great Britain Mormons were only the victims of other religions trying to promote and protect exclusivity. Everything Douglas writes is slanted that way, regardless of the facts in my opinion because it isn't balanced, and doesn't layout the facts and let the reader draw their own conclusions. Nor does it draw a conclusion(s) that are supported by the facts. If I were to speculate, had Douglas done a proper job of writing a historical essay about this period, presenting the facts and drawing conclusions based on where those facts led, he would never have gotten it published by Interpreter. And no other venue would have been interested in publishing something about Mormons in Great Britain covering that period. Nobody outside of Mormonism is interested. It looks to me like Douglas is trying to keep his publishing record up and this was a quick and dirty way of ticking the "article published" box. He was likely operating under some constraints and/or may have had to rewrite it in a more slanted form before Interpreter would accept it.

[Limnor]

I wasn’t able to determine Douglas’s personal religious commitments, though I did come across a single mention of pagan alignment. I think that alignment, if it’s an accurate assessment, may influence his approach to Mormonism as a minority Christian experience in England—I’m leaning toward an assessment that Douglas is engaging in ecumenical dialogue. I’m wondering what his thoughts are about hermetic and folk magic influence on Mormonism.

All that said, I’m with gad in that I don’t see the end state of his engagement and publication in Interpreter.

Plus its not very good.

It's not very good "history" or "scholarship". It's purely an apologetic argument designed from the outset to present the false conclusion that during 1837 and 1842 in Great Britain Mormons were only the victims of other religions trying to promote and protect exclusivity. Everything Douglas writes is slanted that way, regardless of the facts in my opinion because it isn't balanced, and doesn't layout the facts and let the reader draw their own conclusions. Nor does it draw a conclusion(s) that are supported by the facts. If I were to speculate, had Douglas done a proper job of writing a historical essay about this period, presenting the facts and drawing conclusions based on where those facts led, he would never have gotten it published by Interpreter. And no other venue would have been interested in publishing something about Mormons in Great Britain covering that period. Nobody outside of Mormonism is interested. It looks to me like Douglas is trying to keep his publishing record up and this was a quick and dirty way of ticking the "article published" box. He was likely operating under some constraints and/or may have had to rewrite it in a more slanted form before Interpreter would accept it.

Makes sense.

[PseudoPaul]

"The latest Interpreter article is intellectually dishonest..."

This is something that can be said at literally any time and it will always be true

[I Have Questions]

Recently Interpreter posted two blog entries articles by Jeff Lindsey in their ongoing and unbroken run of Friday blog entries articles…
12.26.2025

Parallels between the Book of Moses and the Book of Mormon, Part 1: Details of Their Distribution and Relationships to the JST

And
01.02.2026

Parallels between the Book of Moses and the Book of Mormon, Part 2: The Updated List of 146 Parallels

This strikes me as a bit of a fudge to get two weeks of posting out of just the one piece of writing. Part 2 amounts to what would normally be considered footnotes and appendices for what they’ve called Part 1.