John Gee's Blog of Lamentations

[_CaliforniaKid]

REDUCED TO IRRELEVANCY, STUDENT TURNS TO LIFE OF KNITTING AND CRIME
December 3, 2012, The Times

On November 17, BYU's William Gay Associate Research Professor of Egyptology sent shockwaves through the Mormon Studies world when he asked on his blog, "In looking at Latter-day Saints, with so much insider information are outsider accounts really necessary?"

This short sentence is reconfiguring the discipline as the probity of its insight sinks in. One graduate student, reduced to sudden irrelevancy in the world of Mormon Studies, turned immediately to a life of knitting and crime. "I can't believe I spent all those years developing an outsider perspective on Mormonism, only to discover that it's completely irrelevant and unnecessary," he said, speaking on condition on anonymity. Asked by a reporter if he planned to finish his dissertation, the student responded, "Does it matter?" The reporter had to admit that it doesn't.

At press time, the publication of the present news story was still a matter of some controversy among the newspaper's editors, who questioned its relevancy.

[_Sethbag]

This move to the unchallenged blog by apologists is an interesting example of a phenomenon akin to evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria.

Those apologists who engage directly with critics on the internet generally end up looking foolish, as well as (it seems) drawing the unfavorable attention of the Brethren. The only way to survive is to grow a protective membrane that keeps the critics out.

Well yes and no. One perfectly legit reason for the apologists not to engage critics is that a lot of it turns into stupid crappy catfights. We've all seen it, over and over and over.

If there were a way to enforce a "strictly business" engagement scenario where apologists and critics would go at it on the actual issues (like whether the church really is true) rather than the stupid personal crap that both sides fling about, I'd agree with this general sentiment a lot more.

by the way, it's my view that DCP is brilliant in this. Absolutely brilliant.

Why do I say this?

Because DCP sets himself up as a spear-catcher for the church. Let's say there's a conversation going on about actual issues of church history, the character of Joseph Smith, etc. DCP enters it. People pile on, DCP starts doing his little thing, critics and DCP start flinging their poo at each other. Game over. DCP wins by losing.

He wins by changing the conversation from whatever it was about before, to about DCP. You guys think he does this just to stroke his ego. That's possible, I concede. But by changing the subject to being about DCP, we're no longer talking about the things that actually matter in the question of whether the church is true or not.

[_Darth J]

In looking at Latter-day Saints, with so much insider information are outsider accounts really necessary?

Gee is not an Egyptian. Therefore, he can only offer an outsider's perspective on Egyptology. He really should leave it to people who are actually from Egypt to comment on their own history and ancient culture.

[_sock puppet]

In looking at Latter-day Saints, with so much insider information are outsider accounts really necessary?

Gee is not an Egyptian. Therefore, he can only offer an outsider's perspective on Egyptology. He really should leave it to people who are actually from Egypt to comment on their own history and ancient culture.

The goose and the gander. Always a stinging zinger.

[Guest]

It is interesting to note how people often bring up the interest that academic apologists have for or against some aspect of Mormon belief or practice as proof that Mormonism remains relevant. This is interesting in light of the audience who take academic defenses of and attacks on Mormonism seriously. It seems to me that the audience is very small. Most Mormons don't care either way: they are not Mormon because some dude with a PhD wrote a thesis proving it to their satisfaction. And most "Gentiles" don't care either. They are not Gentiles because they haven't yet been convinced by a dude with the right thesis. Conversion and deconversion don't occur as a direct consequence of apologetics (for or against): they arise within the individual, who changes his mind (and social orientation) for reasons unique to himself. The individual may get caught up in apologetics, making him a rare bird (in my experience), and may even be swayed one way or the other by them (making him even rarer)--but the entire field of apologetics exists largely outside the events to which many participants see it as being relevant.

Most people simply couldn't care less. I imagine this is true for more social organizations than just Mormon ones. How many Catholics are Catholic because they follow everything some Jesuit says with bated breath, sighing in collective relief every time a Dinesh D'Souza gives them some new mantra to wield against the likes of Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchens?

Looking back on my own experience, it seems to me that apologetic faith is never the same as mainstream faith. Apologetic faith is always heretical (as it must be to meet the changing and challenging aspects of the outside world that challenge it all the time). Its audience is always small. Those who practice it invariably become a force for transformation within their own faith tradition (e.g. the Jesuits in Catholicism, or FARMS in LDS Mormonism). Hugh Nibley was not mainstream LDS. His books read transparently (to me) as a coherent, comprehensive critique of Utah Mormon culture, pointing out irrationality and inconsistency in contemporary Mormonism even as they follow it in idealizing the past. When I picked him up as a little Mormon kid, I did not realize this. I was shocked when my bishop expressed "concern" that I was reading Nibley. I rushed to explain how Nibley was actually strengthening my testimony. He was. He was giving me an apologetic faith, a faith oriented toward reason (even if Nibley was not entirely rational) and innovation (even if Nibley always held back from proposing anything too drastic: at the end of the day, he was a company man).

I recently read a neat essay by a former Christian explaining how Christianity is precisely what deconverted him. He was too Christian not to be an atheist. I resonate with this response. I did not convert away from Mormonism. I became too Mormon for Mormonism. I realized that I was committed to the truth (as I perceive it), no matter what. Do what is right and let the consequences follow. As a Mormon, I really believed that, and I still do, even though it has cost me participation in the kingdom of God on earth (where we don't like truth that isn't useful to people like Boyd Packer and Dallin Oaks). I believed that truth was accessible, that I could be honest with myself and others about it, and that such honesty is vitally important for a good society (Mormon Zion). I put my hand to the plow and started working away before I realized what the harvest would be. There were warning signs: leaders told me I could study antiquity without doing it professionally, which they saw as a dangerous proposition, both because of bad job prospects (they were probably wise) and the possibility that I might lose my salvation (they were definitely right: I went from being a Mormon hero to being anti-Christ, in their eyes). But I had a naïve belief that things would work out, that God had my back, that I could trust the truth. I still believe that, I guess. Even if the truth doesn't keep me healthy and happy over a long life safe in the heart of modern LDS Mormondom, as I once thought it would, I am still committed to it. Even if the truth isn't pretty the way I was taught to think it was, I already plighted my troth. I made my bed, and now I have to sleep in it, with the bride (from hell?) that I married. Gee can cry me a river, and it won't change anything. It doesn't even matter if I am wrong (from some imaginary, objective perspective): what matters is that I cannot renounce the subjective commitment I have to the people who trust me to be honest with them about the limited things that I have seen, heard, read, and attempted to understand. Gee can have visions of angels regularly. Bully for him. But they aren't appearing to me. They never have. Maybe I am just a damned piece of crap that God is sorry for having made. ("What is that? Mahonri, stop sleeping on the job and remember that the intelligences need to be intelligent before you send them down to be incorporated!") That is possible. I am not going to deny it. But I have to live with it. I have to be honest (even if I am just honestly mistaken).

[_CaliforniaKid]

I recently read a neat essay by a former Christian explaining how Christianity is precisely what deconverted him. He was too Christian not to be an atheist. I resonate with this response. I did not convert away from Mormonism. I became too Mormon for Mormonism. I realized that I was committed to the truth (as I perceive it), no matter what. Do what is right and let the consequences follow. As a Mormon, I really believed that, and I still do, even though it has cost me participation in the kingdom of God on earth (where we don't like truth that isn't useful to people like Boyd Packer and Dallin Oaks). I believed that truth was accessible, that I could be honest with myself and others about it, and that such honesty is vitally important for a good society (Mormon Zion). I put my hand to the plow and started working away before I realized what the harvest would be. ... I had a naïve belief that things would work out, that God had my back, that I could trust the truth. I still believe that, I guess. Even if the truth doesn't keep me healthy and happy over a long life safe in the heart of modern LDS Mormondom, as I once thought it would, I am still committed to it. Even if the truth isn't pretty the way I was taught to think it was, I already plighted my troth.

This is exactly how I feel about my own deconversion, and I have met so many others who feel the same way. Many people who deconvert do so only after going through a fundamentalist phase. One friend told me he dug so deep he came out the other side. When believers tell atheists that their problem is that they took the faith too literally, I always find myself nodding my head because this is so close to the truth. I'd say "seriously" rather than "literally," though. I was never a full-fledged literalist, and by the time I finally apostatized, my faith was about as non-literal as it could possibly get. My problem wasn't literalism. My problem was commitment. I was absolutely committed to the idea that there was a core of truth in my religion, and that it was my sacred duty to find out what that truth was, and what its implications were for my life. Eventually this commitment to religious truth destroyed itself, so that there was nothing of religion left; only truth.

Years ago, I published a paper on this subject of Christian commitment deconstructing itself. Here's a portion of what I wrote:

Although evangelical Protestants are at the forefront of the reactionary movement against the pluralist deconstruction of Christian exclusivism, deconstruction is not a phenomenon that should be alien to them. The Protestant Reformation, after all, was essentially a deconstruction of the medieval Catholic synthesis; it detected a tension between tradition and scripture and allowed these forces to work radically against each other, thereby producing a new synthesis and a renewal of the tradition. It was this Protestant act of deconstruction, in fact, that unleashed the powerful forces of humanist textual criticism upon the sources of theology, resulting at first in the very desirable unmasking of the pseudepigraphal Donation of Constantine, and later in the less desirable unmasking of pseudepigraphal texts within the Bible itself. As long as these methods were directed against the distinctive sources of Catholic orthodoxy, they were hailed by Protestants as redemptive; now that they are leveled against the distinctive sources of Protestant orthodoxy, they are bemoaned as invasive and unchristian. The truth, of course, is that the critiques of tradition and the Bible are merely two sides of the same coin; the latter is merely an extension of the former. The Bible, as many critics of Protestantism have pointed out, is itself a product of tradition, and its authority is therefore undermined by the radical anti-traditionalism that was unleashed by the Reformers. There is, then, a real sense in which the liberal Enlightenment project of paring biblical religion down to find the essential kernel beneath the husk was a quintessentially Protestant one.

[_RockSlider]

Hermes;

Welcome and I enjoyed (and relate to) your comments. I deconverted in the same manner.

[_Bob Loblaw]

Hermes;

Welcome and I enjoyed (and relate to) your comments. I deconverted in the same manner.

+1

I always thought we were supposed to take our religion seriously, but now I'm told that I was wrong to do so. Silly me.

[_Res Ipsa]

Hermes, thanks for posting the link to your paper. Lots of food for thought there.

[_Fence Sitter]

Hermes, thanks for posting the link to your paper. Lots of food for thought there.

What link?