Reflections on Secular Anti-Mormonism
A Message Board Jam-Packed with Angry Apostates
I will pass over very quickly a message board that I like to monitor that is, in its way, a kind of wildlife preserve for secular anti-Mormons. Some of you are probably familiar with it. Although it is of unquestionable sociological and psychological interest, it offers little if anything of intellectual merit. What was once said of William Jennings Bryan could be said of even many of the star posters on this message board: "One could steer a schooner through any part of his argument and never scrape against a fact." Several, even, of the posters with the greatest intellectual pretensions on the board have consistently demonstrated themselves incapable of accurately summarizing Latter-day Saint positions and arguments, let alone of genuinely engaging them. It's hard not to think in this context of Groucho Marx: "From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down," Groucho wrote to the novelist Sydney Perelman, "I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend to read it." Many on this particular message board seem to be of the same mentality as the academic who was asked whether he had read the new book by Professor Jones. "Read it?" he replied. "Why, I haven't even reviewed it yet!"
What the board does offer are displays of bravado, strutting, believers' arguments completely misunderstood and misrepresented, bold challenges hurled out to those who are barred from responding, and guffaws of triumph over enemies who are not permitted to reply. Dissent is rigidly excluded from this board, even as its denizens criticize the Church for its supposed "repressiveness." However, notwithstanding the rigorous exclusion of all troublesome dissent from their domain, the faith these posters have in their own unanswerably brilliant selves is oddly refreshing to see in atheists, whom you wouldn't expect to believe in any God at all.
Voltaire once explained that "My prayer to God is a very short one: 'Oh, Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' God," he said, "has granted it."
But this doesn't exhaust the pleasures of that message board. It is rife with personal abuse and bloodcurdling hostility, not uncommonly obscene, directed against people they don't know and haven't even met--against President Hinckley, Joseph Smith, the Brethren, the general membership of the Church, and even, somewhat obsessively, against one particular rather insignificant BYU professor. Ordinary members of the Church--Morgbots or Morons or Sheeple, in the jargon of the board--are routinely stereotyped as insane, tyrannical, cheap, bigoted, ill-mannered, irrational, sexually repressed, stupid, greedy, foolish, rude, poor tippers, sick, brain-dead, and uncultured. There was once even a thread--and I'm not making this up--devoted to discussing how Mormons noisily slurp their soup in restaurants. Posts frequently lament the stupidity and gullibility of Church leaders, neighbors, parents, spouses, siblings, and even offspring--who may be wholly unaware of the anonymous poster's secret double life of contemptuous disbelief. It is a splendid cyber illustration of the finger pointing and mocking found in the "great and spacious building" of 1 Nephi. Whenever the poisonous culture of the place is criticized, however, its defenders take refuge in the culture of victimhood, deploying a supposed need for therapeutic self-expression as their all-encompassing excuse.
Contemplating a depressing number of the posters on that board, I've thought to myself, "If this is what liberation from the Mormon 'myth' makes you--a vulgar and sometimes duplicitous crank, cackling with malice and spite--then I would prefer to spend the few brief years left to me (before I dissolve into the irreversible and never-ending oblivion many of the board's posters prophesy for me and all humankind) with people who haven't been liberated. I think of the apostates of Ammonihah, mocking Alma and Amulek in prison, "gnashing their teeth upon them, and spitting upon them, and saying: How shall we look when we are damned?"1 Surely the damned will not look much different than this.
But I'm troubled by the capacity even of far less malevolent message boards to supply a supportive sort of ersatz community as an alternative to the fellowship of the Saints, and I worry about what participation on even relatively benign boards does to some Latter-day Saint souls. I have in mind one frequent poster in particular, who claims simply to be doubting and troubled, but who in fact never misses an opportunity for a snide remark about his Church, in which he remains active, and its teachings. These teachings involve weighty matters of utmost import. Millions have placed their hopes in the gospel's message, and, if this were false, it would be tragic and unutterably sad. Perhaps the cynicism that this poster and many others cultivate is no more than a psychologically understandable defensive shell, a self-protective whistling past the graveyard of doubt. But, even so, it is a shell that will, I fear, block the Spirit. I am not optimistic about his long-term prospects, barring a fundamental shift in attitude (and, even less hopefully, perhaps in personality).
Characteristic of much secularizing anti-Mormon participation on the Web is a corrosive cynicism that, in my experience, will erode anything with which it comes in contact. It is not so much a reasoned intellectual stance as an attitude, or even, perhaps, a personality type.