Cyberbullyng can take many forms, and isn’t limited merely to adolescents.
Under the above title, on the largely apostate/atheist message board where he’s pseudonymously defamed, caricatured, and misrepresented me for the better part of ten years now, a strange personality that I used to call my “Malevolent Stalker” has responded to my recent article in Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture, which is titled “Seeing Ourselves Through the Eyes of a Friendly and Thoughtful Evangelical.”
He cites this passage, from near the end of my article:
I think that we Latter-day Saints can learn a great deal about our own faith and doctrines by trying to see them through the eyes of friendly and informed outsiders, as well, obviously, as understanding the views of others more accurately and sympathetically. Both of these are very worthy goals. And Richard Mouw is one of the friendliest and most theologically competent of such outsiders. He honors us by the attention he’s given to our faith, and we can profit considerably from our interactions with thinkers and scholars of his caliber.
He describes this passage and my article in general as representing “a remarkable development,” a “watershed moment” in the history of what he disparagingly calls “Mopologetics.” It is, he suggests, a sudden about-face, brought on by some combination or other of cynicism and desperation. Flailing about for friends and allies in the wake of my disgraced expulsion from the Maxwell Institute, thrown under the bus by the Brethren, I’m dishonestly pretending that I don’t regard Richard Mouw and others like him with contempt. (The Stalker even has an apostate Mormon source, personally hostile to me, with whom I once had a brief conversation about something else roughly fifteen or so years ago, who assures him that I privately call Richard Mouw an “anti-Mormon” and that I once planned to “target” Professor Mouw for one of my typical “smear pieces.”)
The Stalker is, as usual, offering up a stew of inaccuracy and disingenuousness. And anybody is perfectly free to ask Professor Mouw himself whether our interactions — which go back quite a few years — have been friendly.
But here’s something in the public record:
Back in 1999, well over a decade and a half ago, I published a piece in the old FARMS Review with my friend and colleague Bill Hamblin entitled “The Evangelical is Our Brother.” I expect that my Malevolent Stalker is aware of that piece. After all, he follows everything I do and say with weird obsessiveness. And, anyway, it seems fairly obviously to be the direct source for his thread title.
Here’s an extended quotation from the last page of that sixteen-year-old article, which refers to the evangelical New Testament scholar Craig Blomberg (with whom I also have a friendly relationship) and to the 1997 book How Wide the Divide? A Mormon and an Evangelical in Conversation, which Professor Blomberg co-wrote with BYU professor Stephen Robinson:
We heartily concur when Blomberg calls for “a serious and courteous discussion between informed and scholarly representatives of Evangelical and Mormon traditions” (p.25). “We hope,” he says, “that we can spark many similar conversations between Mormons and Evangelicals and thus inaugurate a new era in which such conversations move us beyond the impasse of previous polemics, recognizing our areas of agreement and clarifying the nature of our disagreements” (p.32).
But such conversations must be carried out in a spirit of mutual respect and sincere desire to perceive and communicate the truth, rather than to win cheap points based on rhetoric and distortion. . . .
We hope that this commendable book will be the first of many such ventures — in print, in the broadcast media, in academic symposia, and in ordinary communities across our nation and around the globe.
The sentiment and spirit of the 1999 passage seems to me indistinguishable from that of my just-published 2015 article, which the Stalker nonetheless tries to depict as illustrating a suddenly and insincerely adopted new pose on my part, in which I “feign friendship” to evangelicals.
“The apologists,” says the Stalker, “have zero interest it trying to understand others’ points-of-view.”
Against which I offer, among other things, my teaching career — during the most recently completed term, I taught an introduction to Islam as a religion, an introduction to Islamic art and literature, and a course on the Qur’an in Arabic. I offer my conception and founding and longtime direction of the Middle Eastern Texts Initiative (which publishes dual-language editions of classical Jewish, Eastern Christian, and Islamic works). I offer the biweekly Saturday column that Bill Hamblin and I write for the Deseret News. And my published biography of Muhammad. And the two editions of my book on Islam for Latter-day Saints (Abraham Divided). And the two books I’m currently finishing (on, respectively Islam in general and the Qur’an). And my many BYU Education Week presentations on such topics as the classical Christian creeds, the Qur’an, the life of Muhammad, and basic Islamic beliefs. And my scores of public lectures across the United States and on every inhabited continent on Islam. And my participation in interfaith dialogues in Utah and Idaho, and Austria, and Israel, and Egypt, and Syria, and Iran, and elsewhere. And so on. And so forth.
My Malevolent Stalker may be deranged. Or perhaps he’s just malicious, consumed with inexplicable hatred. I have no idea. In any case, “the truth is not in him.”
Sad.
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