Gadianton wrote: ↑Sun Sep 27, 2020 10:15 am
So why didn't it shift around the Church for the 2015 policy? Why was that the final blow? I understand from what he revealed in the interview about his family, but the Church has done a lot of dumb, insensitive things. And I have to give David more credit than simply caving on that one thing that got too close to home personally. David is the type of guy who takes injustices to others as seriously as those to himself. I think had his other experiences been different, he may not have caved. I think the Church may have made him an apostate. Nothing the Church ever does is written in stone, and half the Brethren may not have even been aware of the policy.
BYU really did miss out. "Critical study" is a bridge too far only for the person who can't cross it. David may have crossed it. Somebody has to be the first to cross any bridge, no wonder if the journey made him weary. The apologists have spent their careers doing similar things. Inoculation is main Mopologist defense. Anti-lit or anything close to it, is locked up at BYU. We've been counseled not to read it. Yet, DCP brags about family home evening showing the Godmakers because it was such a non-big deal. The solution for critical bible studies is finding the way to introduce it in the right way to stimulate a tolerance, which is exactly what David appeared to be attempting. He was doing what most other adventurous apologists had done before him.
The articles David was given to read by Mark E. Peterson and Boyd "KKK" Packer argued for extreme Chapel Mormonism. It's ludicrous. David gets ousted at BYU because Muhlestein and others measured orthodoxy in terms of obedience to the missing-scroll theory, which the Brethren and far-right conservatives absolutely do not care about. That sends him spiraling down, where he gets picked up by the COB conservatives and lectured on a global flood and evolution, which Muhlestein and the broader cadre of Mopologists don't care about. Everyone has their signals crossed, and it's like a panic sell-off, where David's stock is going down for no reason, no matter what he does.
The things he'd said online were triggers only for a narrow community. I honestly give his letter of recommendation from Bill Hamblin just as much credit for damaging his reputation at BYU as anything. His enviable degree was certainly a factor (jealousy). But none of these things on their own or in aggregate explain what happens, because all of these things could have happened with a drastically different outcome. None of them even give a clue that we're dealing with a wolf in sheep's clothing. There is not the slightest hint that David ever took pleasure in shaking someone's faith. He seemed bound and determine to withhold information just as any good cog in a police state should.
So, my two cents on all of this from the perspective of someone who knows LDS academics at BYU and someone who did apply for a job as a BYU faculty member:
Academic hiring is already pretty looney outside of BYU. There are few jobs, and there are far too many PhDs to fill them. This means that any department that is hiring can make just about any unreasonable, secret demand and dare the applicants to satisfy their contrived need to fill it. One result of this madness is a lot of imposture. There are even people who fake a minority identity of one kind or another in order to secure a job. Some pretend to be gay; some pretend to be people of color.
Now think of BYU. This madness will take its own peculiar form on BYU campus. We can demand that you believe something incredibly stupid because that is what we require of you. Anyone can have credentials. Anyone can be qualified. But will you commit to believe in a universal flood? Will you declare undying fealty to the missing scroll? With people like Kerry Muhlestein running the show, you damned well better. And that is what we have going on here. It is political. It is a matter of meeting the idiosyncratic, unspoken needs of whoever is across that desk asking you questions.
The more I learn about David Bokovoy's situation, the clearer it becomes to me why he thought he had a shot. Only an insider of his particular kind could have been so wildly misled and misinformed as to think he had a shot. Truth is, he never did. I am sorry to be blunt about it, but it almost always comes down to the bizarre internal politics of the place that is hiring, not the qualifications of the candidates.
It's a buyer's market, and BYU Religious Education is in the market for people who are in denial of contemporary scholarship. It wants people who believe the stupid things Packer and Petersen said decades ago. Only by affirming these moronic mantras endlessly to each other do they assure themselves that they will never teach the youth of BYU anything that will ever enlighten them of the outside world or anything that could not be found in a correlated manual, at least to the point that they might question the retrograde, approved narrative of decades past.
Let me tell you how bizarre it is from my small experience. I have a friend in Religious Education. Very bright person. Excellent degree from an Ivy. One day I ran into him at the annual conference for the Society of Biblical Literature. He was going to the book sale, so I followed him around. I watched him pick up various books and pronounce his judgments upon them, "Oh, this is a good one; it was written by a believer." I was flabbergasted. Really? Good because it was written by a believer? This was not the professor I had studied with. This person was someone quite different.
Or, perhaps, he was exactly the person, but I had never known him. This is what he valued and why he had moved from his first department to Religious Education. Now he could feel comfortable. He had found his home. Well, BYU was always neurotic and unsettling, so maybe this was the closest thing to refuge that could be found. A place where you knew everything was OK so long as you adopted the right party view and constructed everything you said and wrote around that.
Is there a place at BYU Religious Education for David Bokovoy or anyone like David Bokovoy? A person as full of honesty, courage, integrity, and independence? I don't think so. As soon as people figure out what is what, they have to choose to toe the party line or choose to leave. Look at Brian Hauglid. When he saw with blinding clarity what Gee was up to, he was dying to fly out the coop. BYU Religious Education is death to the person who really wants to know what's what and sees how everything is arranged to prevent everyone else from discovering it.
"Petition wasn’t meant to start a witch hunt as I’ve said 6000 times." ~ Hanna Seariac, LDS apologist
