OK here is the link to the essay:
https://flux.community/matthew-sheffiel ... nservatism
Here is the Mormonism portion for those who only want to see that part:
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Though somewhat new to the political realm, such disingenuous assertions have become increasingly common among the few beleaguered academics stuck with the impossible task of defending literalist claims about scripture. Leaning heavily on secular deconstructionist writers, fundamentalists of every stripe have begun taking refuge in the idea that the reason their books’ factual claims rarely pan out is that true history is the real myth and that the ancient past is so shrouded in the mists of time that it is essentially inscrutable.
This self-serving and deeply problematic Biblical interpretation has also been popular among fundamentalist Christians, Muslims, and Jews in a much simpler form as an ersatz argument against evolution. Since you weren’t there when humans emerged through speciation, how can you really know that it happened? Never mind that the exact same thing could be said about events portrayed in their faith’s ancient texts.
Fundamentalist Catholic and Protestant intellectuals have been drifting increasingly in this direction as the fields of archaeology, biology, and linguistics keep unwittingly slaughtering their sacred cows. They have been preceded in their journey by literalist adherents of the Latter-day Saint movement who have spent the last several decades successively attenuating their faith’s claims about the Americas having once been populated by ancient Hebrews known as Nephites. Whereas the movement’s founder, Joseph Smith, began his ministry claiming that the tribe ranged across the entire New World, Mormonism’s largest sect has contented itself with the belief that the people’s settlements were so small that they will never be found.
In a 2015 debate about Book of Mormon historicity, William Hamblin, the late professor of history at Brigham Young University and a prominent LDS apologist, tried to justify this major doctrinal retreat as an act of intellectual honesty. He even went so far as to claim that Mormons had no need whatsoever to provide evidence for their truth claims because history ultimately is unknowable and just a matter of opinion:
Whenever anyone demands “objective evidence” for historical questions you know your [sic] dealing with a hermeneutical and epistemological misunderstanding or naiveté. History—in the sense of the actual human past—does not exist. It cannot be directly observed. You cannot experiment upon it by giving Napoleon an extra division of infantry to see if he could win the battle of Waterloo. History is a non-empirical discipline. And anything that is non-empirical cannot be objective. There is, of course, in the study of the philosophy of science, a significant debate as to the degree to which even empirical and experimental disciplines can be “objective” but that is a different question. Be that as it may, history, clearly, is not empirical. Thus, the demand for “objective evidence” represents a fundamental misunderstanding of both the nature of the human past, and our ability today to understand it.
Boyd K. Packer, a former Mormon apostle, put the concept a different way in a 1981 address to religious educators, warning them that the mantle of authority is “far, far greater than the intellect” and that they must avoid informing students of historical truths that might cause them to be critical of LDS leaders.
“There is a temptation for the writer or the teacher of Church history to want to tell everything, whether it is worthy or faith promoting or not,” he cautioned. “Some things that are true are not very useful.”