The CES letter was popular because it was a PDF

[Everybody Wang Chung]

[Doctor Scratch]

I was howling with laughter as I read this--particularly the bits about the "disbanding" of FARMS. My goodness, this is *riddled* with inaccuracies! Correct me if I'm wrong, but FARMS effectively came to an end in *2012*, no? Not "2010" as this article states. And who is their source for this quote: "Those guys were warriors"? They fail to provide a source.

Meanwhile, Dr. Peterson himself clarifies and therefore proves that the fact-checking in this craptastic article is problematic:

I can testify from personal knowledge that, in the wake of the 2012 coup at the Maxwell Institute, many of us were still in stunned disarray and deeply discouraged and we weren’t in a position to mount an adequate response to the wretched thing. And we didn’t have the resources or the venues that we needed.

Matters are rather different now, although we still have miles to go before we sleep. The old FARMS is dead and gone. The Maxwell Institute has long since traveled the way that its new leadership had chosen for it. But FAIR is doing very well, and the Interpreter Foundation was established in 2012 to pick up the torch that the new Maxwell Institute leaders had tossed down. We’ve done it to the best of our ability, staring off initially with absolutely no resources, from scratch. Yet again. Book of Mormon Central, now Scripture Central, came along just slightly later.

There are a few points worth making. First, the "end of FARMS" came about in part because Dr. Peterson resigned. His letter to Bradford, that he also sent to 20 or so "allies," said, "You've achieved your objective. I resign." So, the thing fell apart because *he quit.* He threw in the towel. And Mormon Interpreter was launched just a few months after he resigned and they went ahead and published their Dehlin "hit piece" not long after that. So, this whole idea of "Oh, bummer! FARMS was somehow dismantled, and that meant that no one could attack the CES Letter!" is pure fantasy. And Hales & Peterson's' language is remarkable: "warriors"; "artillery"; etc.: it's the language of warfare, and not of scholarly disagreement. Plus, it's not as if the authors who attacked Grant Palmer were "gone" or "incapable" of responding: they just didn't bother to do it. Hales & Peterson's piece inadvertently demonstrates that they were all a bunch of impotent cry-babies who dropped the ball when the Church most needed them to step up to the plate.

And Hales & Peterson's account of what happened with Grant Palmer is debatable. Palmer's book probably seems dated at this point (and the CES Letter arguably does a better job of getting at the problems in the Church's "official" narrative that Palmer's book), but the Mopologists' handling of Palmer effectively turned him into an ex-Mo "martyr," and has always served as a prime example of the bullying, attack-dog mentality that (again, arguably) eventually led to the downfall of FARMS.

DCP resigned as editor of the FARMS Review because Bradford had (apparently) carefully built up a case that they were no longer going to do attack pieces, and that instead, they were going to move more in the direction of mainstream religious scholarship. DCP saw this as "unfair" and a betrayal of what he thought that Elder Maxwell wanted them to be doing, and so he threw a tantrum and quit. Again: they very easily could have gone on attacking people via FAIR or Interpreter, but he (and the others, I guess?) spent the next couple of years sulking and crying over the fact that they couldn't do this sort of thing under the aegis of BYU anymore.

But in a sense, I suppose Hales & Peterson are right in the sense that the Mopologists never really recovered, because they've never done anything remotely like that Palmer gang-pile-up. And none of their supporters ever seems to describe their work using that same "warfare" language that this silly article uses to describe old-school FARMS.

Quite hilarious, in any case, and a great gift to close out 2024.

[Everybody Wang Chung]

[Doctor Scratch]

It would be great if someone with a Disqus account could go over there and set the record straight in the Comments and let everyone know that FARMS wasn’t “disbanded,” but that it ended because DCP resigned.

[Marcus]

These are tricky arguments to make, too often the rationale tells quite a different story than the authors intended. For example, here is the two pronged argument for why Mormons don't share full history, or as the authors put it:

...There are at least two good reasons for care and caution in how Church history is shared:

The first reason:

Milk before meat. Even before the Church was organized, the Lord Jesus Christ warned Joseph Smith not to give “meaty” doctrines to those who could only tolerate milk, “lest they perish” (D&C 19:22; see also 1 Cor. 3:2). Due to the fledgling faith of some learners, the revelation emphasized that certain more complicated principles and practices should only be taught under the right conditions. Members’ natural hesitancy on complex and controversial matters was exploited by some online, who accused the faith of a lack of transparency.

Okay, members hesitate to share complexities with the unworthy.

Now, the second reason:

Limited teaching time. A second factor is the limited amount of time and opportunities the Church has to teach the membership the core gospel of Jesus Christ. Within relatively short Sunday meetings, there is an understandable prioritizing of core doctrine that results in a curriculum of scripture, doctrine, and history that builds faith yet naturally makes the controversies and other complex subjects secondary.

Oh. So, not even the worthy members have learned the complexities? The church didn't tell anybody about the meat?? Is it possible there is something wrong with the meat? Is that why they don't want anyone to know? Is that why they hid behind the milk until they got caught?

I found it interesting that only one issue from the ces letter was actually discussed, but only in a footnote, and then only the milk. The "meat" of a polygamist's carnal intercourse apparently still just means
"pass the baloney."

[Gadianton]

So, this whole idea of "Oh, bummer! FARMS was somehow dismantled, and that meant that no one could attack the CES Letter!" is pure fantasy. And Hales & Peterson's' language is remarkable: "warriors"; "artillery"; etc.: it's the language of warfare, and not of scholarly disagreement. Plus, it's not as if the authors who attacked Grant Palmer were "gone" or "incapable" of responding: they just didn't bother to do it. Hales & Peterson's piece inadvertently demonstrates that they were all a bunch of impotent cry-babies who dropped the ball when the Church most needed them to step up to the plate.

The more I think about it, I do think they had a broad point with the "viral" spread of the CES letter via social media. But I think they failed to see that this was just one more reason why FARMS was already dead. FARMS published books for people who were into books. Books to counter the books of EVs or to steady the ark when it came to LDS publications. As they say, there were "answers" (whether good or not) for the claims made, and FARMS readers would unlikely be the ones stumped by CES. FARMS would have just preached to the choir. In a way, FARMS and their readers were a self-appointed clergy, full of their own self-importance and knowledge, and social media was like a printing press, which got basic information into the hands of non-elites. FARMS would have been powerless to stop it.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if it turns out that the Brethren sensed that FARMS was too "cliquish" to be of use to the Church in general.

Mormon Interpreter was launched just a few months after he resigned and they went ahead and published their Dehlin "hit piece" not long after that.

An important point: ditching BYU allowed them to engage in their venomous behavior unchecked. There was no reason they couldn't respond to it just as effectively online. What would they have been able to do differently with BYU's backing? It seems like they weren't really in the game. Okay, they printed that one hit piece that had already been produced. But their main focus was hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on a self-congratulatory leather-bound editions of Ghost Committee scholarship. If members only knew that the Book of Mormon is written in early modern English!

The Church maintains an information vacuum. And members learning things for the first time is going to be a big problem.

I can only speculate here, but a platform like Book of Mormon Central could very well be the answer.

[Dr Exiled]

PDF

Plainness Defeats Farms?

[Moksha]

While good things are afoot at Maxwell and other faith defense organizations like Scripture Central, and FAIR, this relative vacuum during the early 2010’s may have contributed to some unfortunate effects.

https://publicsquaremag.org/media-educa ... ith-doubt/

Those original combat warriors at FARMS could crawl through the mud like nobody's business. They could have snuck up on Jeremy Runnels and lobbed some incendiary grenades without him knowing.

While that still does not refute the points he made, it nonetheless stands as a testimony to FARMS sneakiness and combat prowess.

As far as the Interpreter, they were dealt an inferior hand being tasked to defend a fictional work as an actual event when the evidence was stacked against them.

It's anyone's guess why the Church moved toward Scholars rather than warriors disseminating disinformation. Maybe it fits into the theme of BYU being a university or something like that. Argentina was able to have death camps and still be a country, so it is possible BYU could still have FARMS.

[Tom]

I am reminded of some wise words from Mark Twain: “An anti-Mormon work in PDF can travel halfway around the world before The FARMS Review can publish multiple hit pieces against that PDF.”

A few notes and questions:

What triggered the wide dissemination of the CES Letter? Examining a perfect storm of tech, naïvété, and scholarly silence.

Add church silence and lack of transparency as well as inadequate responses from apologists.

Organized by Dr. John W. Welch in 1979, FARMS consisted of an informal collaboration of academics devoted to Latter-day Saint historical scholarship.

I wasn’t aware that John Welch had a doctorate. Which school awarded it? What was the title of his dissertation?

In 1998, President Gordon B. Hinckley of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints formally invited FARMS to join Brigham Young University.

I’m not sure the date is accurate. The October 1997 issue of Insights reported that FARMS had “received an invitation from President Gordon B. Hinckley and the BYU Board of Trustees to have FARMS become part of Brigham Young University.”

Yet less than a decade afterward, there was a significant change, as the entity was subsumed by the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship (NAMI) and effectively disbanded.

Why was FARMS subsumed by the Maxwell Institute and effectively disbanded? Who made the decision to make that change? What impacts did this change have on The FARMS Review?

Prior to this, FARMS’ association with BYU (sponsored and funded by the Church, during the 2000s) gave these advocates of the faith much-needed backing and resources that contributed to an ever more effective defense of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Did “these advocates of the faith” lose BYU’s backing and resources in 2010?

“Those guys were warriors,” remarked one prominent Church defender—a common sentiment.

Who is the unnamed “prominent Church defender”?

The effectiveness of this concentrated defense of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from a strong professional, academic, and faith foundation was powerfully illustrated in the aftermath of Grant Palmer’s 2003 [sic] anti-Latter-day Saint book: An Insiders [sic] View of Mormon Origins.

Palmer’s book was published in 2002.

On June 1, 2004, four separate reviews of Mr. Palmer’s book were simultaneously published in the journal’s “Review of Books.”

The reviews were published in The FARMS Review. I’m not certain about the source of the cited publication date of June 1, 2004.

All of these “heavy hitter” reviewers possessed PhDs, several of them in history.

This sentence is inaccurate. Ashurst-McGee did not possess a PhD when his review was published.

Dr. Stephen [sic] C. Harper’s Trustworthy History? incisively demonstrated the manipulation of data and evidence Mr. Palmer engaged in to support his Church-hostile thesis while highlighting significant scholars, topics, and sources the critic had selectively ignored.

It’s Steven C. Harper.

Six months later, on January 1, 2005, the FARMS Review released a fifth review of Palmer’s book: Asked and Answered: A Response to Grant H. Palmer, by Dr. James B. Allen—focusing on Palmer’s individual criticisms of the Book of Mormon.

Again, I don’t know the source of the cited publication date. It is true that Dr. Allen’s review featured a large section on the Book of Mormon, but Allen also responded to Palmer’s examinations of the priesthood restoration and accounts of the First Vision.

Over subsequent years, Grant Palmer’s book was generally ineffective in persuading others to leave the faith or remain away from it—except among some of the more uninformed or already hardened detractors of the Church. Its faith-draining influence, over time, became a blip.

What hard data are the authors using to measure the impact of Palmer’s book?

“… A Faithful Reply to the CES Letter by Jim Bennet (2018).”

“Bennet” should read “Bennett.”

Runnells’ letter was released in the spring of 2013. Why didn’t the Interpreter Foundation or FAIR release a comprehensive response in PDF later that year?

[drumdude]

John W. Welch is Robert K. Thomas Professor of Law, Brigham Young University. J.D., Duke University (1975); M.A. Classics, Brigham Young University (1970); Lit. Hum., Greek Philosophy, Oxford University (1970–1972).

Who debunks the debunkers?

https://interpreterfoundation.org/author/johnw/