On the author of “The Triumph of Faith”

Some have challenged my laudatory comments today about Rodney Stark’s The Triumph of Faith not only on the customary grounds that I’m an incompetent buffoon and a liar (of course!) but because, they say, Dr. Stark was guilty, back in 1984 or so, of making absurdly high estimates regarding future growth of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

It seems that Professor Stark, too, is breathtakingly inept and that his recent book can, thus, be dismissed without any need to look at it.

I see things differently, of course.  At a very minimum, it would be quite an achievement for a grotesquely incompetent pseudoscholar to have earned a doctorate at Berkeley, taught for thirty-two years at the University of Washington, landed the position of Distinguished Professor in the Social Sciences at Baylor University, and published nearly 150 academic articles and more than 30 books with such university presses as Rutgers, Columbia, and Princeton, while twice winning the Distinguished Book Award of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.

You have to hand it to him.  That’s not bad for a complete laughingstock and hack.

Here’s a useful little newspaper article from back in 2011, by the way, on those Mormon-related estimates:  http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700103390/14-million-Mormons-and-counting.html?pg=all