I’ve made no attempt at even so systematic a survey as Jana Riess has, here in this article, but I too have noticed the fading away of the old classic Evangelical anti-Mormon publishing machine.
When the FARMS Review began back in 1989 (under the then title of Review of Books on the Book of Mormon, or, as it was also affectionately known, ROBOTBOM) it often responded to the emissions of Evangelical anti-Mormonism. Gradually, though, as the years passed, it did so less and less often.
Partly, that was because the materials didn’t change. They didn’t improve. They didn’t acknowledge our critiques and rebuttals. Not even implicitly. They just kept repeating the same tired charges over and over again — except, of course, for the Ed Decker/Bill Schnoebelen/Loftes Tryk wing of the movement (“New Age anti-Mormonism,” as I dubbed it), which grew more and more innovative, which is to say more zany and outlandish, as the years went by. Bill Hamblin and I dreamed of doing a movie called Bill and Dan’s Excellent Adventure in Anti-Mormon Zombie Hell, because, even when you shot them in the head, squarely between the eyes, these Evangelical polemicists just kept coming.
In more than a few encounters, we were unavoidably reminded of an important scene from one of the finest films ever made.
But as time went by, it just didn’t seem that there were as many specimens of Evangelical anti-Mormonism being coughed up. And now, Jana Riess has noticed the same thing:
“Dr.” Walter Martin died in 1989. Jerald Tanner died in 2006. Hank Hanegraaff, “Dr.” Martin’s successor as head of the Evangelical “counter cult” ministry called the Christian Research Institute, was received into Eastern Orthodoxy in April 2017. Utah Missions Inc., an operation based in Marlow, Oklahoma, that was one of my most reliable sources of silly claims and poor logic — I once thought, halfway seriously, of putting together a book of practical logical fallacies based entirely on UMI’s monthly tabloid — appears to be defunct. Even the amusing Ed Decker is now well into his eighties, and his efforts and influence are the merest shadow of what they once were.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that challenges to the claims of the Restoration are no longer emerging out there. But their nature has changed. Increasingly, they’re secular — sometimes even from within the fold. And Evangelicals are confronted with the same sorts of things. They’re busy, thus, with their own troubles. (I think I might add that to Dr. Riess’s possible complex of explanations.)
Posted from Kaanapali, Maui, Hawaii
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