The Most Overrated Mormon Scholars

        In the middle of eating lunch at the LDS National Security Conference the person sitting next to me was so sad they missed hearing Patrick Mason speak and without thinking I groaned. The conversation stopped and the table looked at me. I then awkwardly explained that I was rather unimpressed with his scholarship in a number of ways.

        Incidents like this happen on a regular basis as I receive quizzical and sometimes angry looks and questioning when I don’t share someone’s enthusiasm for a given scholar. In many cases that’s because the scholar in question is part of my overrated club. What follows is a list that doesn’t discount the meaningful scholarship of these individuals. The list is more about inflated or misplaced praise and uncritical hype. Yet those behaviors are so pervasive and shape our evaluation of ideas that I need to identify the most frequent recipients of hype.

Michael Quinn

        I attended the same conference as him (War and Peace in Our Times) towards the end of his life and the beginning of my career. The fawning praise he received was closer to worship. Even though he was discussing an issue for which he had no appreciable training or knowledge (military history and ethics), and wasn’t providing anything particularly noteworthy, a reverent hush came over the room when he provided an answer.

        Then the paper he presented had numerous glaring and unexamined implications as I detailed here. I describe how Quin uncritically accepted J. Reuben’s Clark isolationism to such a degree that Quinn failed to notice his subject’s hypocrisy, pro-Nazi stance, and how his views were overruled by other church leaders at the time. The last point is especially egregious since one of Quinn’s book invented disputes among church leadership when it suited his arguments, but seemed to ignore meaningful disputes in this case because of biased favoritism towards the isolationism of J. Reuben Clark.   

        Those are just the problems I found in my personal interaction with him. As summarized by Sarah Allen, he was also known for his tendency to personally attack those he disagreed with, and to play fast and loose with the connections he made between the factual record and its supposed meaning. So I imagine his article about J Reuben Clark probably had even more problems than my cursory review. (As far as I know, no one has interacted with his presentation more than I have.) 

        His popularity seems to result from the good fortune of being from a favored minority group, homosexuals, his writing about the same topic, and his work was thoroughly, and rightfully I believe, dismissed by the ~evil~ “FARMS” crowd. Because Mormon historians are the most biased of any group I’ve ever seen (while ironically calling their opponents biased), he was criticized by the "right" group of people, as a result, those criticisms never carried the weight they should.

Hugh Nibley

        I love Hugh Nibley and his work. His works helped spark my academic journey and often helped me on my mission. But Hugh Nibley was often too sloppy with his footnotes and saw too many vague connections to the point that he embodied the concept of “parallel mania.” Its a real criticism, but I should note that parallel mania is often used by his critics as a pat buzzword to ignore the real connections that he made. Nibley’s work is extremely outdated and there have been often decades worth of additional scholarship that contradicts his work. This is common in academia and not a problem if scholars properly engage and build upon previous scholarship.

        But his fans are often dilletantes instead of scholars. Like a right-wing inverse of the left-wing love for Quinn, too many people uncritically read a Hugh Nibley book and suddenly think they are experts. He is quoted chapter and verse, but there isn’t much thinking beyond seeing a parallel to Nibley’s words, and a quote.

        Chinese theorists had the same annoyance with people quoting Sunzi. They ended up writing about it, and if you change the subjects to Hugh Nibley, it is surprisingly accurate:

Even though the mouth recites the words of [Hugh Nibley], the mind has not thought about the mysterious subtleties of the discussion...[they] merely recite the empty words and are misled by the enemy...

The study of [any subject] must be from the lowest to the middle and then from the middle to the highest, so that [the learners] will gradually penetrate the depths of the teaching. If not, they will only be relying upon empty words. Merely remembering and reciting them is not enough to succeed.[1]

Patrick Mason

        Given my specialty in ethics and just war I encounter Mason a great deal. I’m sorry to say, I’m just not impressed. He has all the credentials, praise, institutional power, and seems to publish or present in every conference imaginable. But I find his scholarship lacking. His book, Proclaim Peace, ignored or minimized many important scholarly points regarding just war. He tries to have his cake and eat it too by claiming the non violent ethic of Jesus from the New Testament is "absolute", while also acknowledging verses that clearly support just war. But the latter is clearly lip service forced on him because he spends so much time supporting the former. 

        In a Maxwell Institute funded piece he ignored King Benjamin’s speech, distorted his preaching and policies, and invented an offensive war to imply the Nephites were colonialist. After reading about Michael Quinn’s lapses in scholarship, I might even say the invention of an offensive war whole cloth from the scriptures sounds like what critics called Quinnspeak. At best, he just didn’t read the text carefully.

        After noticing his failure to read texts carefully, I started to wonder if he read some texts at all. I carefully started looking over some of his work, and I see a pattern where he relies on secondary sources when quoting church fathers.[2] For example, every footnote in “Zionic Non Violence” referencing Christian fathers refers to a secondary source. Based on his footnotes, he doesn’t read the works of major just war theorists, he stumbles across an occasional quote in various pacifist books. Yet he feels imminently qualified to call them “insufficient” and he is celebrated as some kind of guru on peace making.  

        Privately many people tell me that he gives vibes that he thinks he is the smartest man in the room. He asked a smarmy gotcha question to me during a conference I attended that was poor form. The peace studies program at BYU-Hawaii held a peace conference about his book, which I’m sure didn’t help his self-admitted arrogant smugness, and he and his peace studies friends in the audience actually snickered when discussing arguments from people like me. 

        I found that behavior rather unseemly, especially for someone who claims his attitude will bring a Zion like peace. It’s especially hypocritical considering the attacks levelled against FARMS for the same behavior. Anti Mormons included an incident at a conference as one of the “top” events of 2011. #3 on that list described how the ~evil~ Maxwell Institute “scholars” (the scare quotes added by the author) were seen “sniggering” before they lobbed a series of “aggressive and mean spirited” questions in their “verbal assault” on Mike Reed. But when I’m “verbally assaulted” by Mason’s smarmy gotcha questions and heckled by a hostile audience, they remain celebrated peacemakers.

        I liked his book about 19^th century lynchings and his advice designed to help struggling members. But his academic work on peace has numerous methodological gaps and is celebrated far beyond its actual merit. Even more importantly, his unseemly behavior ranging from his poor research into Church fathers, to gotcha questions and sniggering run contrary to the unearned praise he gets for supposedly building bridges and a peaceful Zion.

Conclusion 

        Many of these scholars are household names. But a close look at their scholarship suggests perhaps they shouldn’t be. The biggest flaw is that we often uncritically accept the arguments of a celebrity scholar, when we should be thoughtful and critical readers of any argument and engage their thoughts and arguments. In short, we substitute their reputation for our thought. The result is that we spend more time praising than thinking. I hope this post will help check that tendency. And maybe if you hear something from me during lunch at a conference, you'll understand. Thanks.

I work as a freelance author. If you found value in this work please consider donating using the paypal button at the bottom of the page, or purchase one of my books linked in the top left. 

*****

---

[1] Questions and Replies Between Tang Taizong and Li Weikong in The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China, Ralph Sawyer trans., (Westview Press, 1993), 338, 360. 

[2] Rethinking Righteousness in the Shadow of War, fn1 reads: Idolatry 19, p. 73, quoted in Lisa Sowle Cahill, Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Pacifism, Just War, and Peacebuilding (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2019), 77. See also: fns. 6-10 in Patrick Mason, "Zionic Non Violence as Christian Worship and Practice," in How and What you Worship: Christology and Praxis in the Revelations of Joseph Smith, Rachel Cope, Carter Charles, Jordan T. Watkins eds., (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book), 2020.