Mayan Elephant wrote:the very very best we have seen with this is dehlin and mormonstories. he does not allow anything, ANYTHING, that remotely resembles dissent or disagreement in his forums or groups. when he is done being "angry," it is time for the group to be done being angry. his forum is a reflection of the brand and the product. dehlin calls it his "living room," and suggests the forums are a reflection of him and his home.
I can see Dehlin as marketing himself, although I guess it depends on which of his Facebook groups you're referring to; I was just his "Friend" until I left Facebook a little over a year ago, and most of his posts were about movies he liked or TED, pictures of kids, etc. I was never part of the "Wards" (which I only heard about recently on one of his podcasts), but his public Facebook page is undoubtedly a marketing tool--but I think that's implied already when it subtitles John Dehlin as as "Public Figure." Is that such a bad thing?
What about other Facebook groups, though? I suppose you could say that the Mormon Hub (is that still there?) was marketing a certain brand of hipster Mormonism to the extent that most of the members of that group were hipster Mormons and those who weren't didn't last long. But that would water down the meaning of the word "marketing." Same with the old MormonExpression VIP Lounge. Indeed, in that case I would say that it was because of a very determined group bent on marketing their particular ideas to the exclusion of others that led to its demise. I never got the sense that the purpose of the group existed just to market MormonExpression; it wouldn't make much sense since everyone there was already a devoted listener anyway. We just liked to bitch about Mormonism without the moderation of the the Hub and the (long since non-existent) Mormon Stories Podcast group that was its predecessor. There was one apologists group that I was in briefly, but they censored anything that had the whiff of a critical air.
Apologetics that doesn't engage critique, though, I think is not apologetics so much as a motivational regime (like a sales training seminar?).
Mayan Elephant wrote:the apologists have tried, desperately, to replicate this with sic et non, and multiple board efforts. their biggest issue is that their product sucks, they are trying to sell a shamwow that is not absorbent. but the other issue is that they goddamn suck at their marketing and salesmanship. they suck at managing a conversation and they suck at hosting a community.
I think they are not selling a product so much as promoting a lifestyle. In this, some of the critiques that they make about liberal Mormons are just as true regarding themselves. There is a certain outlook you must adopt (if you don't have it already) to be an apologist: conservative in politics and aesthetics, and deeply concerned with "serious" intellectual issues. You must quote Shakespeare and other lights in the cannon because, hey, Nibley did that all over the place. You must play up your interest in and knowledge of antiquity (because history is a key to all epistemology; without history, Mormonism can't be "true"). And of course you should probably be male and white. In sum, I think what internet apologetics is is a kind of club, not an intellectual activity. To the extent that it involves any activity at all, that activity is not geared towards the traditional role of apologetics in Christianity and other religions--namely, defending the tenets of the faith by means of the dominant intellectual modes of the day--but rather the activity is geared towards just being part of the community of apologists. From what I have seen of their Youtube presentations, FAIR conferences look less like exercises in doing apologetics and more like demonstrations of just being apologists: a National Geographic film-essay of apologists in their natural state.
Mayan Elephant wrote:all one really needs to compare is this - sic et non/Interpreter v. the rest (Mormon Stories, Bloggernacle, Times and Seasons, By Common Consent, etc.) all those other names and brands are going to attract people's attention before anything called sic et non. it is the equivalent of naming your congregation the Highland 46th Ward and expecting people to show up because they are told to show up, or naming it the Highland Community and Family Congregation and actually trying to get families in your congregation. dan thinks like a Mormon, while other people are behaving like educated adults marketing to Mormons. that is what is killing the apologist business.
I don't know. Mormons are overwhelmingly patriarchal, conservative, white, and middle-to-upper-middle class, and if either are appealing to that demographic at all, it will more likely be the apologetics people than the liberals who run and participate in blogs like Times and Seasons etc.
"As to any slivers of light or any particles of darkness of the past, we forget about them."
—B. Redd McConkie