Good Apologetics: What Do They Look Like?

[_Kishkumen]

Agree with him or not, I think this piece by Taylor Petrey is a positive example of apologetics that is not conducted in the snarky, condescending, and insulting manner that numerous other FAIR, FARMS, and MI pieces have adopted in the past.

Is Mormonism Ridiculous?
By Taylor Petrey

In The Book of Mormon Broadway musical, the central character Elder Price sings, “I Believe…” followed by a mixed series of benign and ridiculous claims. The genius of the song is that it so perfectly performs widespread American perceptions about Mormonism in the early 21st century. Elder Price, and Mormons in general, are presented as harboring some naïve and strange ideas, but in the end being good people with good intentions who might actually be able to help people.

Mitt Romney’s upcoming nomination as the Republican candidate for President seems to confirm how Mormons generally have come to be understood. Even Evangelical Republican voters have largely overcome some hesitancy about Mormonism, perhaps accepting it the way viewers of The Book of Mormon musical come to accept Mormons. Romney may hold some wacky religious ideas, but he is a good person who may actually help some people.

Like Elder Price and Mitt Romney, Mormons are praised for certain characteristics: being nice, having good families, valuing industry, thrift, or for being good citizens in the community. These are indeed genuine compliments that any community should be proud of. What is missing from this list of positive attributes is praise for Mormonism as having any important religious ideas. In fact, praises of Mormons as people often include the caveat that Mormon ideas and beliefs about angels, golden plates, and Kolob are strange, weird, ridiculous, and sometimes even dangerous.

The common response to the idea of Mormonism’s weirdness is to insist that all religions are weird to some extent. Mormons and non-Mormons alike utilize this response. Stephen Colbert said it best when he quipped, “Mormons believe Joseph Smith received golden plates from an angel on a hill, when everybody knows that Moses got stone tablets from a burning bush on a mountain!” Jon Stewart similarly evaluated the angst about Mormonism as a kind of arbitrary stigmatizing that can apply to any religion. There is something compelling about familiarizing Mormonism by way of defamiliarizing accepted religious stories, yet this also remains unsatisfying to explain why anyone would believe incredulous things.

The trotting out of apparently ridiculous Mormon ideas is evidence of just how little Americans really understand religion. Religious people of all stripes should be concerned with the way Mormonism is portrayed because it reveals the inability of people to ask the right kind of questions about religion and to discern how religious people construct their worlds. Discussion of Mormonism in the media tends to reveal the fundamentally unethical way that Americans think about religion, engaging in reductionism, decontextualization, and stereotyping. It is not enough to suggest that all religious are equally silly (a point Bill Maher’s Religulous makes not in defense of religion, but against it). This perspective represents a failure to understand religion at all.

Such shallow explanations of Mormonism tend to decontextualize certain details that are embedded within larger narratives in a way that renders them humorous or bizarre, but unintelligible as meaningful religious ideas. It would be like saying that Christianity is about the belief that three Zoroastrian magi followed a star to a house in Bethlehem or Islam is about the idea that Mohammed flew on a horse to Jerusalem. These may be accurate details, but shorn from the broader context they reveal essentially nothing about Christianity or Islam. Bullet lists of strange ideas hardly explain what people find compelling about the Christian or Islamic narratives and does little to illuminate the meaning of these religions to billions of adherents.

How then should we think about religions that avoids reducing them to a few salacious ideas? Iconic scholar of religion J.Z. Smith has suggested that in the way we speak about religion, there is “a tension between religion imagined as an exotic category of human experience and expression, and religion imagined as an ordinary category of human expression and activity.” (Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982], xii.) In other words, we are often tempted to treat religion as something strange and exotic rather than as a normal way of engaging with the world. When we engage with the religious ideas of others, we owe them the respect of an explanation of what may be intellectually compelling about them. What kinds of problems are they seeking to solve? How do they make sense of the situation around them?

Like most religious traditions, Mormonism emerged to resolve some kind of spiritual or intellectual problems its early adherents saw in the competing options available to them. In order for Mormonism to survive, it has had to continue to be relevant, to address something that people find compelling. As the discussion of Mormonism continues in the public sphere, it may be useful to understand what people find compelling about Mormonism, and even why so many apparently smart and capable thinkers remain committed to its teachings.

There is no doubt that public discussions of Mormonism will remain interested in difficult issues from its past, including polygamy and its history of excluding people of African descent from priesthood leadership; and its present, including excluding women from priesthood ordination and its teachings about homosexuality. These discussions are important, and will hopefully be conducted responsibly and fairly. Rather than focus solely on these more problematic and controversial aspects, we might practice an attentiveness toward Mormonism as a paradigm for thinking about religion more broadly, to articulate Mormonism as offering a persuasive evaluation (for some) of human situations. The questions that we should be asking, and Mormons should be answering: How does Mormonism handle the big questions? What is the meaning of life, of death, of the terrible and the good in the world? How do Mormon notions about the cosmos affect ethical decisions toward others? What do Mormon narratives about the past and the present offer their adherents? These are not simple questions, and the answers are not simple either. To discuss them at all is a serious endeavor. While we may laugh (and I think we should) about religion, we can only do so ethically if we learn to think with religion as well.

[_Samantabhadra]

Kish, thanks so much for posting this essay. As someone who believes that the master who brought Buddhism to Tibet emerged as a fully formed child from the center of a giant magical lotus I agree 100% with the author.

[_Aristotle Smith]

I think this piece by Taylor Petrey is a positive example of apologetics

I'm having a hard time seeing how any of the essay is apologetic. It doesn't actually defend any specific Mormon beliefs. It doesn't actually defend any beliefs at all, it merely posits that all religious beliefs are equally silly to outsiders. While that might be a valid presupposition one should take (I don't think it is, but I'll grant it for argument's sake) prior to engaging in apologetics, in an of itself it doesn't defend anything in one's belief system that it doesn't also defend in the belief system of others.

The second main point of the article, that discourse about Mormonism needs to focus on the big questions is fine, but it isn't going to happen. In fact, I think the new crew at something like MSR will be even less likely to focus on big issues than were the old FARMS crew. The quest for academic respect almost always results in looking at narrow and obscure questions, never in dealing with big issues. No one was ever told that their dissertation or article was too narrow, while the opposite is common place.

Plus, the LDS church really doesn't want Mormons talking about big issues. Big issues in a Mormon context always brings up doctrines that the LDS church would rather see go away. For example, you can't talk about life and death issues without bringing up King Follet issues. It's hard to talk about evil without broaching that Satan, Jesus, and all the rest of us are brothers/sisters. And so on.

[_Cylon]

Yeah, I think I'm with Aristotle on this one. Also, pointing out that religions have answers to Big Questions that comfort people does not in any way invalidate the observation that they also teach things that make little sense and/or are silly.

[_Kishkumen]

I'm having a hard time seeing how any of the essay is apologetic. It doesn't actually defend any specific Mormon beliefs. It doesn't actually defend any beliefs at all, it merely posits that all religious beliefs are equally silly to outsiders. While that might be a valid presupposition one should take (I don't think it is, but I'll grant it for argument's sake) prior to engaging in apologetics, in an of itself it doesn't defend anything in one's belief system that it doesn't also defend in the belief system of others.

The second main point of the article, that discourse about Mormonism needs to focus on the big questions is fine, but it isn't going to happen. In fact, I think the new crew at something like MSR will be even less likely to focus on big issues than were the old FARMS crew. The quest for academic respect almost always results in looking at narrow and obscure questions, never in dealing with big issues. No one was ever told that their dissertation or article was too narrow, while the opposite is common place.

To the contrary, I think the call to treat Mormonism fairly as a belief system that addresses meaningful issues for believers, the kinds of questions missionaries broach right away with investigators, instead of getting lost in all of the trivial details is a fundamentally apologetic gesture. It does not have to be a defense of a specific belief in order to function as a defense of the faith. Cleverly, it precludes the fairness and value of focusing on issues like Kolob and the like, in order to get past those topics that are bogging down discussion and exoticizing Mormonism for outsiders.

On your second point, I think his suggestion is more about how people talk about Mormonism in public discourse than in the arena of experts and scholars. Back in the day it may have been thought appropriate to focus on the pope as that guy with the goofy hat, but these days not so much. Likewise, today everyone obsesses about Romney's magical underwear, but this misses the more important point about Mormonism as a covenantal faith, and so forth.

[_Stormy Waters]

The questions that we should be asking, and Mormons should be answering: How does Mormonism handle the big questions? What is the meaning of life, of death, of the terrible and the good in the world? How do Mormon notions about the cosmos affect ethical decisions toward others? What do Mormon narratives about the past and the present offer their adherents? These are not simple questions, and the answers are not simple either.

Quite simply these questions are just not as interesting as polygamy, the priesthood ban, garmets, and becoming God's. I think people are quite naturally drawn to the aspects of Mormonism that are strictly unique from Christianity. Also I submit that questions on these topics are indeed "big questions".

[_Aristotle Smith]

Cleverly, it precludes the fairness and value of focusing on issues like Kolob and the like, in order to get past those topics that are bogging down discussion and exoticizing Mormonism for outsiders.

On this we are going to disagree vehemently. I see no reason to "get past" any topic when discussing religion. It's all fair game. When you want to rig the discussion and put some topics out of reach before discussing anything your aren't discussing anything, your are doing PR. And that is the quintessential apologetic strategy of the bloggernacle. Instead of focusing on issues, moderate and regulate the discourse based on "fairness" and "board rules" etc.

But more than anything, it's indicative of a faith that simply doesn't have any courage or confidence in its message anymore. This isn't Paul going around saying, "we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles" (1 Cor 1:23). Instead of owning doctrines and explaining them, issues are avoided in the name of some sense of "that's not fair" or "that's just bogging down the discussion."

How is this any different from failing to disclose to investigators the seedier aspects of LDS history and doctrine? After all, isn't that particularly unfair to LDS beliefs? Doesn't that just "bog down the discussion" when the goal is to have a speedy and orderly path to the baptismal font?

[_Samantabhadra]

To be clear, I think there is a categorical difference between the claim that God revealed the Deuteronomical law to Moses on Mt. Sinai on the one hand, and the claim that Moroni revealed "Reformed Egyptian" plates to Joseph Smith on the other. And I agree with Aristotle that the essay is not properly speaking "apologetic" in that it does not defend any particular truth-claim, LDS or otherwise. But I think the minor premise is sound: it is unfair to pick strange-sounding or otherworldly doctrines and use those points, out of context, to critique an entire religious tradition.

As for the major premise, that Mormonism can or ought to be evaluated independently of the truth value of propositions such as "Lamanites really existed," well that is almost an entirely different issue. I'm sympathetic to Kishkumen's exegetical project, and I'd like to hear more about how he squares that particular circle.

[_Kishkumen]

On this we are going to disagree vehemently. I see no reason to "get past" any topic when discussing religion. It's all fair game. When you want to rig the discussion and put some topics out of reach before discussing anything your aren't discussing anything, your are doing PR. And that is the quintessential apologetic strategy of the bloggernacle. Instead of focusing on issues, moderate and regulate the discourse based on "fairness" and "board rules" etc.

But more than anything, it's indicative of a faith that simply doesn't have any courage or confidence in its message anymore. This isn't Paul going around saying, "we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles" (1 Cor 1:23). Instead of owning doctrines and explaining them, issues are avoided in the name of some sense of "that's not fair" or "that's just bogging down the discussion."

How is this any different from failing to disclose to investigators the seedier aspects of LDS history and doctrine? After all, isn't that particularly unfair to LDS beliefs? Doesn't that just "bog down the discussion" when the goal is to have a speedy and orderly path to the baptismal font?

Hey, Aristotle-

You are right. We are most definitely not going to see eye to eye on this one. I don't see the utility in proving religion true or false based on a set of mythological trivia taken as fact, whether it is an angel stirring a pool at Bethesda or Kolob being near the throne of God. I simply don't find questions like that pertinent the way you seem to do. I'm cool with that. In fact, I really don't care.

Furthermore, I was defending the idea that his gesture in placing decontextualized trivia out of bounds was apologetic. I think your reaction to the idea speaks volumes.

[_Aristotle Smith]

it is unfair to pick strange-sounding or otherworldly doctrines and use those points, out of context, to critique an entire religious tradition.

It may be unfair, but there's an easy way to combat it. You simply explain why the person writing the attack piece was a bozo by explaining in context what the actual position is.

But there's the rub, nobody on the side of the LDS church wants to do this. Not the conservatives, not the liberals, and not the corporate LDS church. They don't want to do this because doing this would involve:

1) Staking out an actual doctrinal position (which the corporate LDS church doesn't want to do)
2) Putting the actual issue in context (and thereby showing how much many positions have changed over time, which the conservatives don't want to do)
3) At the end of the day, having a position seem just as silly as when you started or maybe even more so to outsiders (which is unacceptable to the liberals, especially those who have professions where intellectual prestige is the coin of the realm)

Take something like polygamy. If you look at its original context, it makes perfect sense. The context is known and it's not hard to explain. But why don't Mormons actually do this? Simple, one or more of 1-3 above is going to apply. So instead of doing this, it's easier to carve out rules and try and get people to not talk about it.