Daniel Peterson wrote:It's been nearly twenty years. I can't recover my thought processes from that time with any great precision or certainty. It was probably an oversight to allow that implication to stand, just as it may have been an oversight on Professor Robinson's part to make it in the first place.
This all happened a long time ago. In one sense it's not entirely fair to raise subjects that were discussed in 1992, and people's opinions do change over time. Understanding and accepting a person's
current perspective (which may have changed as a result re-evaluation, and even
challenges to previous thinking) is important to being fair to them. That's what we need to evaluate and distinguish. Shades is one person who unabashedly, even proudly, presents his missionary journals for the world to perv on. I think few of us would be that bold (I burned my missionary journals), but it merely indicates how much Shades has
changed, and can look back with amusement, even shock, at how his thinking was as a young missionary.
To move on, from the editorial:
While others are certainly free to dispute Stephen Robinson's specific attempt to apply the Book of Mormon's account of Korihor to contemporary thinking, I do not see that believing Latter-day Saints can disallow his attempt in principle. But it is striking that, although some at Signature have bristled at the "Korihor" label, so far as I am aware nobody has denied Professor Robinson's substantive grounds for assigning it. It is rather as if someone were to label a man a "Benedict Arnold"—and to allege specific reasons for doing so—only to have the accused or his defenders respond merely that it isn't nice to call people "Benedict Arnolds," and that one should be more polite. This is an important point. In the New Jersey federal case alluded to above, the court held that a critic's privilege to speak his or her mind remains intact if the facts are truly stated, and if the critic's comments are fair and an honest expression of his or her opinion. In ruling against the author and publisher of Casino Gambling for the Winner, Judge Sarokin wrote that "Plaintiffs have not challenged or refuted the accuracy of any of the facts asserted by defendants, and a reasonable reader is given sufficient information from which to make up his or her own mind on the opinion stated."35
Was Professor Robinson's language strong? Indisputably. "You have irresponsibly supported an attempt to besmirch the professional reputation of other scholars," one enraged letter-writer to the Salt Lake Tribune informed me.36 Was Professor Robinson's article a violation of the law, or legally actionable? I very much doubt it. (Bill Russell, one of the contributors to Vogel's book and a lawyer himself, would later admit in a published letter that he saw "no reason for George [Smith] to sue FARMS")37 I would rather hope that, in the words of the 1990 Supreme Court decision, public discussion and disputation in Mormondom "will not suffer for lack of imaginative expression or the rhetorical hyperbole which has traditionally added much to the discourse of our Nation" and which, that court expressly declared, has received "full constitutional protection."38
Calling Names, or Naming Names?
No serious Christian, however, would want to guide his or her personal life solely on the basis of the law's minimal requirements. There is a higher standard. Something may be legal, yes, and yet unethical, unwise, or unkind. So is there any place for invective in civilized public life? Is there any place for sharp language in the intellectual life of the Latter-day Saints? What should be its limits? What is "name-calling"?
In a certain sense, the answer to the first question is clear. Whatever one may think of its desirability, sharp invective has historically played an important role in public life. One has only to thumb through Leon Harris's wonderful survey of The Fine Art of Political Wit to realize how pervasive and even enlivening has been the use of name-calling and biting humor at the most exalted levels of Anglo-American political discourse.39 But it goes beyond politics. Sharp epithets are hardly foreign to the groves of academe. Scholars, too, can occasionally grow very exercised and intense, even in the highest and most respectable academic circles. They can be rough, sometimes nasty. I offer two recent examples, selected, not from the writings of redneck obscurantists, but from the flagship journals of the two most prestigious North American organizations dedicated to the academic study of religion.
Given DCP's current position, I don't think he'd now agree that "name calling" is, after all, such a good idea (especially here on MDB). He's stated in the past, on FAIR, that he doesn't like the the use of the word "apologist", especially when it is meant to demean true believers. But this is exactly what "Korihor" was, a demeaning term. Having said that, I don't think there's a single person who'd victoriously survive scrutiny of everything they've said or believed in the past. The question is whether we've
learned from the past.
One thing that hasn't changed is DCP's agressive approach to criticism of the Church, nor his desire to have critics "for lunch". That will only change when DCP modifies his strong literal beliefs (which I don't think will happen), and until then "ecumenism", of any type, will have no part of his vocabulary. This is not only true of DCP, however, but of every true believer. Many true believers, however, like Mike Ash for example, are not as agressive in their rebuttals to critics, so I put this down to individual nature, and not necessarily "all apologetics". The other point that needs attention, is that DCP's "Reflections on Secular Anti-Mormonism" does raise good points about how aggressive critics of the Church and Mormons, can be. It is largely this to which he responds, and understandably so. You really can't blame him for making such responses, and they are not even "in kind" responses, but an attempt to expose folly through wit and satire, and in my opinion, in that particular speech it was very effective. I do sympathise with those Mormons who are the object of open and continuing ridicule by ex-Mormons. We have to try to see this from "both sides".
Has it all been a smear campaign? Not all. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Signature set out to correct what, in my opinion, was a serious deficiency in Mormon historiography. Once I discovered Signature, I don't think I ever bought another book from Deseret. Here is where I think FARMS went wrong, in too overtly ridiculing their opponents, and Professor Robinson's essay was a ringleader in how apologetics should
not be done. But observers of the
Review will realise that Professor Robinson's essay was not the first in this genre. When I read Tom Nibley's (Hugh Nibley's son) reply to the Tanners, I could barely distinguish the dripping sarcasm from actual criticism (and I
was interested in the latter, at the time). Some excerpts from
Nibley's essay:
Unfortunately for our sagacious swamis, they seem to have remembered only the first part when they bring up Alma and the six-hundred-years-from-Lehi-till-the-birth-of-Christ prophecy.
Now if our super sleuths had taken the time to do a little elementary arithmetic they might have been canny enough to see that the translation was moving slower, not faster, at this time.
Robert also tells me the Tanners are not ad hominem in their approach. Well, just for fun, let's look at some of the evidence. We could, for example, take note of their habit of calling Mormon scholars "apologists" (Does this word perhaps conjure up images of sniveling cravens desperately scrambling to cover up one heinous indiscretion after another, all the while whining "I'm sorry, I'm sorry"? No, of course not.
Note: This was
after Robinson's "Korihor's press" remark.
But, then, what does Webster know? Language is determined by usage, and the Tanners, not unlike Humpty Dumpty, use the language just as they please.
Now let's check out some of the other methods our meritorious mentors subscribe to.
Are there really people on this earth so gullible or so desperate to prove the Mormons wrong that they buy into this foolishness?
But I can't let this subject go without one other observation: our perspicacious pedagogues point out that,
If you want to please the Tanners, aim for the airy aeries of arcane academia where your production can be pedantically pondered by professorial pedagogues such as, well—the Tanners!!!
The Tanners, exhibiting their typical meticulous scholarship, ignore these and any other papers or studies on the subject (the Larsen and Rencher article lists fifteen other works, most by non-Mormons, in a footnote.
But, armed with an impressively powerful nescience of the field, they strap on helmet and buckler and sally forth.
And what is our friend Oliver doing during these long excursions into duplicity? Practicing cat's cradle maybe, or whittling decoys in anticipation of duck season?
they thereby show that their grasp of the rubrics of logic is tenuous at best.
This isn't scholarship. It looks more like entertainment, and that's how I viewed it at the time, because his sarcasm all but obliterated his points. It is little wonder Eugene England objected, and this is an example of the "tone" that Signature was concerned about. I don't believe Signature set out to attack, but to provide information that simply wasn't coming from Mormon scholars and historians. That move, however, was perceived by people like Professor Robinson, as an "attack".
I haven't read recent most editions of the
Review, and although I learned a lot from the
Review in the 1990s, I consider it to be more apologetics than serious scholarship, but that's not to say it didn't play an important role in my weighing very important matters when I was going through my own "cruciable". After the mid-late 1990s, when I no longer felt the need for "apologetic buffering", or "faith boosting" in a literalism I had abandoned, I also abandoned reading the
Review, because I viewed it as largely apologetic. (I did continue to read the
Review into the late '90s though, but mainly from a more critical perspective, and it was still entertaining up to that point, and informative in many ways, of issues I would not have learned about except through the
Review.)