On the one hand, I am sympathetic to this line of thought. On the other hand, I find it interesting that time and again the things that we were ridiculed for thinking might be the case about LDS apologetics turned out to be true, after all. And I think I understand why. I think it is probably thought that this is none of our business and no one is obliged to be perfectly honest with us. Moreover, it is unfortunately the way of things that people who are opposed to each other's objectives will not trust each other. They just won't.
I would say that the sum total of all of the things we have seen and heard steadily dripping out concerning LDS apologetics tends to confirm our overall sense of the problems. Sure, we may be wrong about individual things, and I have no doubt that that is the case, but, on the whole, I would say that our suspicions were generally correct. At least, they were not so far off that we deserve the ridicule coming from some quarters. But, of course, we can expect to be ridiculed, and we ought not to cry about it. These are our opponents. They must run us down in order to protect their own credibility. We can also see honestly that we treat our opponents pretty badly for our own emotional and rhetorical purposes.
What is really unfortunate, in my mind, is that for many people the memory of FARMS is tainted by this particular facet of its history. I don't think that this is necessarily our fault, however. When Bill Hamblin lamented the end of classic-FARMS, and we were reading all of this in terms of hit-pieces and unfair reviews, or general overzealousness and mean-spiritedness as we experienced it from our vantage point, we and many others came to associate FARMS with that negative experience.
My work on the MToM (Master Timeline of Mopologetics) pretty much upended my whole sense of what FARMS was. The nastygram reviews and hit-pieces were just one part of a much larger picture. Sometimes it is easy to forget that. Sure, we may not believe or agree with the rest of FARMS either, but I hope we can sympathize with the genuine, sincere love, curiosity, and search for meaning at the heart of the FARMS enterprise at its foundations. FARMS was so much about Jack Welch's energy, enthusiasm, bright and voracious mind, and desire to do good as he understood it. He hit upon chiasmus long before FARMS was formally started. It continued to be something that FARMS celebrated pretty much up to the point where Maxwell was transformed into what it is now. Frankly, I love that. I am very sympathetic to the joy in curiosity, the interest in texts, and the desire to unpack meaning that seems to have inspired Jack Welch to do what he did. That for me is the true legacy of FARMS.
I still see that legacy over at Interpreter.
What many of us got caught up in (and here I am including everyone on all sides in that pool from which the many are drawn) is the fighting. Fighting against anti-cult ministries, fighting against critics, fighting against apologists, fighting against each other. This board has a lot of that fighting. We are continually wrapped up in criticizing Peterson, Midgley, and others. I am not here to criticize anyone for being wrapped up in that because it would be hypocritical of me to do so. What I will say, however, is that being wrapped up in this will necessarily distort our view of these things, and distort our perception of those with whom we interact in the fight. We don't know FARMS and we don't know Interpreter. There are things about them we may never understand. Our criticisms of them are partial and not perfectly fair. Our criticisms, at the same time, also hit close to home and are at least partially accurate. We have learned things from the fight that we otherwise would not have known. And I think that this is true regardless of what we hear from Dr. Peterson about it all.
On occasion we need to be able to step back from the fighting and appreciate each other as human beings. We need to hold onto the part of our humanity that is not locked in a struggle against our opponents. Everyone we are arguing with has that part of themselves that is not defined by this fight. What I said about Jack Welch also applies to Dr. Peterson, Dr. Midgley, and the late Dr. Hamblin. We may not believe what they believe. We may not agree with their scholarship and methodologies. We may be very angry with them for the way they conduct themselves in the fight. But they, too, were and are motivated by positive things in their pursuit of meaning in Mormonism. That is one of the reasons I take a posture here and elsewhere, regardless of the criticism it invites.
To get back to Dr. Moore's original comment, I think it is understandable that people don't believe DCP. Yes, he has denied it. Yes, he may be telling the truth. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that people will believe him. This is not because they are stupid or insane. It is because they do not trust him. That's the nature of the beast. I will be honest and say that I don't fully trust him either. I may be sympathetic to him and see good things in him, but when it comes to this struggle, I have a really hard time taking him at his word, although I sometimes do.
