Jonathan Neville’s woven, tangled web

In preparation for a historic General Conference, Jonathan Neville has begun setting forth his criticisms of “the M2C* triumvirate,” which is what he collectively calls John L. Sorenson, John W. Welch, and Kirk Magleby. His most recent post is a long, rambling word salad–slash–Neville Mad Libs that repeats most of his stock claims that have been repeatedly falsified on this humble blog (and somehow also manages to drag sexual purity, of all things, into the conversation).

The first of two brief examples of his prevarication is in this statement:

A key point: facts don’t matter. If you have ever tried to persuade people to change their minds by presenting facts, you know it doesn’t work. That’s why we are not trying to persuade anyone of anything. We seek only to help people discover “good information” and detect “bad information” so they can make their own informed decisions.

People believe they have their own facts that are better than yours. If they realize their facts fall short, they change the subject. Hundreds of thousands of LDS missionaries have experienced this directly.

That’s why the critical dynamic is your starting point. Whatever your initial premise, you can find facts that support it. If you support the prophets, you find facts that corroborate their teachings. If you disregard the prophets in favor of scholars, you find facts that corroborate the scholarly theories.

It’s really that simple.

His claims about one’s “starting point” have some merit, but he’s apparently unable to see that this applies as much to him and his Heartlander comrades as it does those who disagree with them. No matter the number of times critics of the Heartland movement have pointed out its broken geography, its reliance on discredited and fraudulent artifacts, and its canonization of the personal writings and theories of Church leaders, they simply “stop their ears, that they should not hear.”

Worse than this, though, is Neville’s continual and continuous repetition of the same blatant lie that those who believe that the Cumorah of the Book of Mormon is not the same hill as the one in New York are “disregarding the prophets in favor of scholars.”

For the umpteenth time, Brother Neville: There is no revealed location of the hill Cumorah. Your claim that you and other Heartlanders “support the prophets” rings hollow because you support certain statements made by certain prophets, and you disregard the teachings of other Church leaders, including certain living prophets.

Neville continues in this vein later in the same blog post:

[Book of Mormon Central] is managed by the founders of FARMS. They convinced themselves decades ago that the prophets were wrong about Cumorah and that M2C is the only viable explanation for the Book of Mormon.

Once again, this is a bald-faced lie. Based on my decades-long reading of their works, no one associated with FARMS (which Neville furthermore falsely claims was “abolished in 2010”) nor with Book of Mormon Central believes that “the prophets were wrong” about anything. They do, however, agree with living prophets—namely, the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles—who have urged “members not to advocate those personal theories ” concerning “Book of Mormon geography and other such matters about which the Lord has not spoken…in any setting or manner that would imply either prophetic or Church support for those theories.”

That prophetic counsel is something that Neville and his Heartlander comrades stubbornly refuse to abide by. Neville continues to insist that the Heartland view is the only one that “supports the teachings of the prophets.”

In his same blog post, Neville also continues to call the Gospel Topics Essay on Book of Mormon geography “anonymous.” He does this because it suits his need to downplay its authoritative nature as an official statement by the Brethren. And yet it contains explicit instructions from the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, which demonstrates their involvement in the writing and posting of that very essay. So much for “supporting the prophets.”

And so, Jonathan Neville’s poisonous rhetoric continues to divide and accuse, while he blithely dismisses any concerns and insists that he’s just “presenting facts” and “not trying to persuade anyone of anything.”

I trust that informed, alert Latter-day Saints can see through his bombastic smokescreen.

—Peter Pan

* “M2C” is Jonathan Neville’s acronym for the theory that the Book of Mormon took place in Mesoamerica and that the hill Cumorah in the Book of Mormon is not the same hill in New York where Joseph Smith received the plates of Mormon.