Physics Guy wrote:A fascinating high-level view. I was surprised to see the Watson Letter in first place just because it was new to me. The episode does seem to embody the essential weirdness of aggressively theorizing apologetics in a church led by a living prophet.
Either it really doesn't matter where Cumorah is, and so the apologists should shut up, or it does matter, and so the prophet should speak up.
That, ultimately, is what set all of this in motion: i.e., FP Secretary Watson "speaking up." The episode is fascinating in the way it lays bare the internal politics of the Brethren vis-a-vis the Mopologists. You may have noticed Dr. Peterson talking about an "internal document" that was allegedly floating around: he claims that Elders Oaks and Maxwell were "overseeing" this document. Well, whose name is on the Institute that the Mopologists used to occupy? And did Maxwell come up with the language of the document himself, or did he get some help from Sorenson, Welch, Midgley, and others? (And for that matter, did Maxwell know that they had cribbed this from an RLDS hoax?)
If you try to talk about Mormonism in the non-Mormon universe, you're going to say there were all these Nephites in the Americas and immediately get the question, "Um, where?" Everyone knows that the Americas are big, but everyone knows that everywhere in them is a real place that you can probably see now on YouTube, and everyone knows that you can go there and dig. When they hear ancient history they expect archaeology. So pinning down where everything happened really matters a lot. In the Mormon universe, however, the prophet is the best judge of whether the prophet should speak; the prophet hasn't chosen to make an unequivocal churchwide declaration on geography; and so the setting of the Book of Mormon clearly does not really matter.
You are right: it doesn't matter, but it's taken decades for the Mopologists to accept this.
It's not just because as secretary to the First Presidency itself Watson was close enough to spit on the burning bush. I think the deeper point is that Watson was as close to the burning bush as any modern apologist could ever come, because if any of the apologists ever got face time with the prophet to argue for limited geography, the prophet would say, "Who are you and what are you talking about?" And everyone knows that. Mormon apologetics is just as absurd within Mormonism as it is outside it. It lives between the two worlds, not in either.
I could not have put it any better than this. This is why Dr. Shades's old "Chapel Mormon / Internet Mormon" distinction has gotten so much mileage: it pretty much perfectly captures the Mopologists' strange, liminal status.
Perhaps this is also part of why para-church institutions like FARMS and the Maxwell Institute and FairMormon and Interpreter are so important to Mormon apologists. Proxy institutions become icons of legitimacy that are precious precisely because of their ambiguous status. Just as it was equally vital that Watson was secretary to the First Presidency and that he was only the secretary, so the Neal A. Maxwell Institute was crucially ambiguous for the apologists. It bears an apostle's name and is part of BYU, yet is not part of the church itself. It wasn't just their home. It was the only home they could have.
Which very much helps to explain why their ejection from the MI was so painful for them.
"[I]f, while hoping that everybody else will be honest and so forth, I can personally prosper through unethical and immoral acts without being detected and without risk, why should I not?." --Daniel Peterson, 6/4/14
