antishock8 wrote:Answer this question: Does the church finance Mormon apologetics?
Let's see how honest this Mormon is...
Poor antishock8.
I've always, for years, every time the question has come up, pointed out that FARMS was given low-priority office space by the university -- which clearly indicates at least a minimal level of support for the activities of FARMS (which are partially apologetic) on the part of BYU, which is largely funded by the Church. Poor antishock8 imagines that I haven't said this many times, but poor antishock8 is wrong. More recently, with the acquisition of FARMS by the university, and with the establishment of an umbrella organization first called the Institute for the Study and Preservation of Ancient Religious Texts and now the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, the relationship between the various activities of the Institute -- some of them apologetic and many of them not -- and the university has become obvious and official. Apparently it has come as a stunning shock to my Malevolent Stalker, normally quite an obsessive sleuth, that an entity owned by BYU receives funding from BYU, and that BYU -- brace yourselves -- is affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which largely funds the university. And poor antishock8 regards it as a vast and gratifying surprise.
One of the many ironies here is that the Institute actually receives relatively
little funding from the university -- far, far less, proportionately speaking, than any other department, college, or other entity on campus -- leading some of us who are affiliated with the Institute to joke about beng owned by a minority shareholder. It would actually be more accurate to say, using Scratchlogic, that "the Church itself" funds the teaching of evolution at BYU, and that the Brethren "supervise" such teaching, than to say such things of apologetics, since the Maxwell Institute is only partially supported by BYU (and none of its projects receive university funding, let alone funding directly from the Church), whereas teaching in the College of Biological Sciences is
wholly funded by BYU and the College of Biological Sciences has several fundraisers attached to it whose checks are, as my Malevolent Stalker puts it, signed by the Presiding Bishop.
FARMS brought an endowment into the university, when it agreed to join BYU, that it had raised entirely on its own from private donors, without help from school or church. It continues to draw on that endowment, as well as on both operating and endowment donations and on royalties from books, to fund its on-going projects -- projects that BYU does
not fund.
When FARMS grew out of its low-priority BYU office space, it bought its own. When it came into the university, that private space came into the university with it, and, as compensation for the school's acquisition of that property, BYU agreed to help FARMS (which has since morphed into the Institute) raise money to expand its endowment and cover its research, editing, and publishing expenses.
Why did the university want to acquire FARMS? Was it to support FARMS apologetics? No. The primary reasons, by far, were two: First of all, the property that FARMS had acquired was property that the university had sought in vain for years to acquire, and which it wanted for its campus development plans. (It is directly south of Campus Drive, right below the Widtsoe Building.) Second, FARMS was doing internationally respected work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and everybody doing it was a BYU professor, yet, when that work appeared, it appeared under the name of FARMS, a private foundation. The university wanted to gain the academic credit for first-class work done by its faculty, who had established FARMS to foster research and publication of a kind that these faculty members felt had been neglected by the university.
Finally, on a somewhat separate note, I really don't understand why Gadianton regards this as so sinister and "creepy." Harvard, Stanford, the University of Utah, Yale, the Audubon Society, the Sierra Club, the Democratic Party, the Anti-Defamation League, the National Organization of Women, the Boy Scouts of America -- all employ fundraisers. There's nothing weird or unprecedented about this.