Desert Dweller

These younger Mormon apologists are coming from a completely different environment. A different Mormonism really. They’ve grown up shaped inside apologetics and polemics, so these reinterpretations feel normal to them. They haven’t really experienced lived Mormonism as it was, what you might call Bruce R. McConkie Mormonism of certainty and hard claims. They haven’t lived through the church calling things anti Mormon that turned out to be real history. Instead, they’ve inherited something thinner, more flexible, more abstract, more surface level where they can ignore deep doctrines and past teachings and prophets that teach things they don’t like. And that’s all they know. They are trained to creatively resolve problems instead of confronting them. Their informative years were based on “doubt your doubts” while we were raised with Hugh B Browns’ “We must be willing to give up cherished beliefs if evidence and truth require it.” So when contradictions show up, the instinct isn’t to question the system like it was for many of us Gen Xers. Their instinct is to reframe it. That’s what they believe is the best way to find truth. The Stick of Joseph podcast is an example. A couple guys in their 20s. If you watched that interview with John Dehlin, it’s hard to miss the combination: confidence without context and arrogance. But it’s not just indoctrination. This social media thing has given them more incentive. In-group platitudes and shallow statements get likes and views and praise. Their identity, platform, and status are tied to defending the system so their reasoning is motivated, not neutral. They haven’t had a chance to think for themselves. And now with social they cannot. You can see these apologetics have changed from guys like Hugh Nibley to apologetics that just try to soften problems. Ward Radio, Stick of Joseph, all these shows have zero depth. They’ve shifted from Hugh Nibley claims to how do we create ambiguity so anything could be allowed to be true? It’s the only way to survive modern scrutiny, by making everything unfalsifiable. So now they’re arrogant. They think they’ve figured it out better than us old guys. Because they’re “more nuanced” and “intellectually mature” than the past generations. They don’t get caught up in minor things like polygamy, race in the priesthood, anachronisms, Book of Abraham translations like us old idiots do. And it’s our fault we didn’t research this stuff and just believed the church when we were growing up. Really the generations have grown up in entirely different religions and cultures. And while we may have been trained to think more black and white, the younger generation has been trained against thinking critically.

In 4 days we have the privilege of hearing from prophets and apostles who have been called of God. Think of it as a “Celestial State of the Union”, if you will.