We are asked to dismiss John Dehlin's claimed inside information, and substitute DP's claimed inside information.DP wrote:Steve Smoot alerted me a couple of days ago to the fact that John Dehlin is still claiming, on the basis of alleged inside information, that Elders Marlin Jensen and Jeffrey R. Holland were “involved” in my 2012 removal from BYU’s Maxwell Institute. Supposedly, too, this was a “direct” result of my “unwillingness to back down.”
I’m not exactly sure just what it is from which I’m supposed to have refused to back down. Mr. Dehlin likes to imagine that the Maxwell Institute drop-kicked me out the door because we were moving toward the publication of Greg Smith’s manuscript about, well, the views of John Dehlin. (By the way, I’m happy for this opportunity to call attention yet again to that meticulously researched and eye-opening paper. See “Gregory L. Smith’s Review of “Mormon Stories.”) I don’t believe it to be true that Greg’s paper was the principal cause of my dismissal as editor of the FARMS Review, though it almost certainly played a role. If, however, Mr. Dehlin is alleging that I refused to back down from publishing that article, he’s flatly wrong. When, in a face-to-face meeting between the two of us, the late M. Gerald Bradford, who was the still relatively recently-appointed director of the Maxwell Institute, requested that we not run Greg’s article, I immediately agreed to his request, noting that we had another article in hand that we could easily substitute in its place. My only question was whether we were being asked to withhold the article permanently or whether this was just a temporary request, pending Dr. Bradford’s having an opportunity to read it. (He had not yet read it — virtually nobody had, outside of our editorial team — and, so far as I’m aware, he never did.) My question was never answered.
The Maxwell Institute never did publish that substitute article, of course, because, shortly after our meeting, Dr. Bradford altogether terminated publication of the journal. Coincidentally, though, the proposed replacement-article was also by Greg Smith, and it eventually appeared in Interpreter as ““Endless Forms Most Beautiful”: The uses and abuses of evolutionary biology in six works.”
But back to John Dehlin’s assertion that I was shown the door of the Maxwell Institute on the orders of Elders Jeffrey R. Holland and Marlin Jensen: I have absolutely no reason to believe this to be true. On the contrary, I have very strong reasons for my confidence that it is not true. (I’ve shared some of the most convincing of those reasons orally, with people whom I trust not to publish them in print or on the internet, but — because they are based upon private conversations — I will not share them publicly unless and until my papers go into the L. Tom Perry Special Collections archive in Brigham Young University’s Harold B. Lee Library.) To reiterate: I flatly deny John Dehlin’s claim.
I’ve denied false claims about this matter from John Dehlin on several previous occasions, most particularly perhaps on 16 October 2013 and, in a reposted and slightly expanded version of that 2013 statement, in a blog entry posted here on 29 May 2017. Here is that expanded statement, yet again:
Given that we have no way to verify either, which man is more credible?
