On the Road, Part 2

Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling ("RSR") was published and available for sale to the public on September 25, 2005. The first section of On the Road with Joseph Smith is titled "Preparations" and covers July and August of 2005, a period in which Bushman reviewed the RSR galleys from his publisher, spoke with journalists and book reviewers, and fretted more than a little over how the book was going to be received by its two primary audiences, Mormons and non-Mormons. Here are a few quotes (in italics) from this section of the book, with my comments following.

How the book will be received remains up in the air. I know a lot of Mormons are interested, but will they be surprised or put off? ... As for non-Mormons and especially the scholarly critics, I am ready for a mixed response (p. 9). Bushman didn't want to get tagged as an "apologist," but notes that critics ought to be acknowledged as "cynics" rather than granted some default status as more objective than believing historians writing about Joseph Smith.

Jed Woodworth sent me the first formal review of RSR. ... It was definitely friendly, laudatory in almost all respects (p. 10). The review was written by Jeffrey Needle for AML and is available online at the AML site.

[H]ow can a reasonable historian even pretend the events of the Book of Mormon are true? That is a fact of life for all Mormons all the time. They live with the realization that much of the world they believe to exist [i.e., Nephites as recounted in the Book of Mormon] is nonsense for everyone else (p. 14). This was from a letter sent to a Christian scholar who was puzzled by what she took to be Bushman's expressly believing perspective in RSR vis-a-vis Joseph's visions and the Book of Mormon account, but then she admitted surprise at her own puzzlement, given that many Christian scholars take a similar approach when writing about the Bible and she didn't see anything wrong with that. (I'd call it "Christian myopia," but I've never seen it given a label before.)

In his lengthy reply to the scholar, Bushman went on to note Mormon counter-puzzlement that Christians won't accept that "we believe in the book of Mormon on the basis of a spiritual witness" (p. 15). Surprisingly, Christians tend to take a different approach, "insisting their beliefs are based on reason and evidence" (p. 16). Which, if you think about it, helps explain why some Christians are so smug about attacking Mormon faith claims, naively thinking their own faith commitments are not vulnerable to the same type of criticism. I thought the Christian reliance on "reason and evidence" as a basis for faith went away in the 19th century — if that still describes how Christians define their faith, it explains why Evangelicals are so threatened by evolution and science. And by Mormons.

Comments

[Guy Murray]

The "objective" history theme seemed to be a recurring one with Prof. Bushman in this book. He seemed resigned to the fact that he would take hits from scholars because he was a "believing" scholar or historian. Yet, at the same time he seemed to fear the would alienate "believing" Mormons by providing an honest history of Joseph Smith. It was lose, lose.

It is ironic that some of our Christian "brothers" have no qualms believing in the Resurrection; but, throw in some Gold Plates, or an open cannon with continuing revelation to Apostles and a Propeht, and wow there's just not a chance that could happen.

[Seth R.]

I think you're right Dave. Most of the evangelicals I've encountered online seriously believe they've got hard evidence backing up their religion. As opposed to us Mormons who are just delusional.

It would be almost charmingly naive if they weren't yelling at you at the same time.

I always encounter the line "well we know from hard historical evidence that a person called "Jesus" and a people called "Israel" actually existed. But there's absolutely no evidence for the Book of Mormon."

I would agree with the essentials of that statement. But what these people don't get is that this is actually not an advantage to the born-again belief scheme. Because many events in the Bible can be independently researched and verified the book is actually MORE vulnerable to being independently discredited, not less. What happens when Israeli archeology directly contradicts accounts such as those of the Exodus? What happens when contemporary texts in... say... Babylon don't back up the stories of the exile or contradict it?

The Book of Mormon simply doesn't have these problems. Evangelicals, no doubt, call that convenient. And it is.

But they seriously need to stop strutting about their own "unassailable Bible." The book is no such thing.

[Dave]

Seth, this perspective also explains why the Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris books are making such a splash. Hey, Mormons have been dealing with this kind of criticism for a hundred and fifty years, but Christians haven't had to deal with direct attacks on their faith claims in quite the same way. Like a hothouse plant that is suddenly thrust out into the cold, harsh world, they aren't really prepared to deal with it very well.

[Clark Goble]

Jeff's was the first? Interesting he let me reprint it at my blog when he first wrote it.

[Clark Goble]

BTW - nice point about Hitchens. When I read Hitchens on Mormons it really did read like "more of the same." Like a screed written by an Evangelical back in the 60's. Almost embarrassing.

[Brandt]

Re: Seth

I think that is one of the misunderstandings between mainstream Christianity and the LDS crowd. Like you said, the LDS have been dealing with this for over 150 years, whereas mainstream Christianity seems to have just come under fire for it. It seems like over the last 30 years the concept of "Maybe there's more to this than we think" has come about.

The question in my mind and the issue in my mind is the hubub that the LDS Church gets. Instead of mere acceptance (such as other religions receive), we are cast away in contempt. How many people, upon finding one is LDS, get a smirk, or a snide remark comes out, about our religion? I'm sure others get it as well, but it seems like ours is almost an automatic reaction, whereas others may be hit and miss

[Clark Goble]

Brandt, I think Protestantism has engaged with these issues. It's just that fundamentalism - which frankly is where the growth of Protestantism has been over the past century - was a reaction against it. That is rather than engaging with these issues it turned against it and simply avoided engagement.

Now there are, to a far lesser extent, similar movements in our own Church. (I think the evolution debate is a great example - much of the "no death before the fall" movement depends upon not having an engagement on the scientific issue)

So I think it's somewhat unfair to castigate our Protestant friends.

Having said that though it has become much harder to be an island. And fundamentalists are grappling with this. Indeed I think much of the homeschooling movement is the attempt to maintain islands and avoid these problems by avoiding conflict. In a certain way I suspect the Mormon exile to the west was the attempt by Mormons to do that. And we saw how that turned out. Yet it remained in a lesser extent through much of the 20th century. Since the 70's though as we were so international and outside of "Deseret" we found we couldn't do it. So we're used to this. Protestants aren't.

[Jared*]

Interesting post. I am reminded of Bertrand Russell's "Why I am Not a Christian," where he says that the Catholic Church declared that God's existence could be proved by unaided reason. (I don't know if that is fair to the Catholics or not.)

[Matt Thurston]

I loved On The Road as well. Finished it in one sitting. In fact, like Ann, I liked it better than Rough Stone Rolling. I think that is because I feel more "truth" watching Bushman wrestle with the Joseph Smith enigma (and by extension, with Bushman himself) than I do by reading Bushman's scholarly conclusions of the man. In that regard I find the depiction of Bushman in On The Road more immediate and fascinating than the depiction of Joseph in RSR. With RSR, Bushman was trying to present a more "human" Joseph Smith to the world. I think he accomplished his task, but along the way the "more real" human he presented was himself.

[Ivan Wolfe]

I recall, in the one and only Bible Bash I ever had on my mission (with a couple of preachers), that when I tried to bring up Moroni's promise, they just laughed. These preachers said, "We don't believe the Bible because of a warm, fuzzy feeling. We believe the Bible because it is self-evidently true."

That seemed to be a pretty common feeling among evangelicals I met as a missionary. The Bible is self-evidently true and that's why they believe in it. That makes anyone who doesn't believe in the Bible either a liar, an idiot, or a dupe of some sort.