Another good one is Bushman’s “Rough Stone Rolling.” While Brodie got ex’ed for her book, Bushman is still a Mormon in good standing. They have made progress.
Fawn wasn’t ex’d for writing a book, LJ. She was excommunicated for public, and rather blatant, apostasy. She even admitted that she had lost her faith in the church considerably before she wrote the book, and she refused to change, or edit, proven inaccuracies in it; her bias was rather striking.
For instance, Bushman’s portrayal of Joseph Smith is ‘acceptable’ to critics because he talks about a very real, imperfect, man. Everything he writes is documented, and, if something he writes makes a TBM a little nervous, it’s presented clearly and with compassion. He actually has the nerve to believe that Joseph was what he claimed to be, AS WELL as being very human. Brodie operated with a bias that is undeniable; she threw out anything that could be positive about the man, or twisted it so that her view of him was the only view the reader is allowed…and she had been, by her own admission, ‘apostate’ for at least ten years before she wrote the book. Her thesis, indeed, is that there is no God, and since there isn’t one, any person whose actions rely upon there being one is, ipso facto, a fraud and a con-man. In other words, there is absolutely no room in her examination of a man who claimed to be a prophet of God that there is any possibility that anybody could be a prophet of a non-existant God. This results in a very skewed viewpoint for any theist.
In her book she exagerated greatly: putting important incidents in times and places they could not have occurred, even altering geography in order to do so; exagerating numbers to support her view point; raising the number of Joseph’s companions when doing so would illustrate her point, lowering them at other times for the same purpose. Sjhe took comments out of context…for instance, she quoted BY as saying this: If he (Smith) acts like a devil, he has brought forth a doctrine that will save us, if we abide by it. He may get drunk every day of his life, sleep with his neighbor’s wife every night, run horses and gamble . . . but the doctrine he has produced will save you and me the whole world"’ in an attempt to show that BY was aware of, and accepted, Joseph’s weaknesses. What she forgot to mention was that this statement was made by BY to a priest who had accused Joseph of having committed “almost every known crime.” BY’s answer was a rhetorical device–taking the previous speaker’s objection and, by showing its irrelevence to the point, answering it. He wasn’t SAYING that JS was all those wicked things (how could he? He had not, at the time of this statement, actually MET THE MAN YET!) he was saying that even if he were, if his doctrine is true, it’s true. IN other words, he was calling this priest on a fallacy of ad hominem.
Good historians who don’t have their own personal axes to grind tend to avoid this sort of thing.
Bushman, while he is uncompromising in his look at Joseph, is also fair. Brodie…wasn’t.
(translation for the lazy…“This animal is evil. When attacked, it will defend itself.”)