Jonathan Neville and reductionist history

Brian Hales is the author of the excellent three-volume book series Joseph Smith’s Polygamy. He recently posted this YouTube video, responding to claims from apostate cultist Denver Snuffer that Joseph Smith never practiced plural marriage:

As I listened to Hales’s presentation, it struck me how much Snuffer’s methodology resembles Jonathan Neville’s. Both men are reductionists, which Hales defines thus:

Reductionists reduce the discussion of a controversy to a small number of evidences and interpretations that are offered by the teacher, like bread crumbs that can be followed, one by one, to the teacher’s conclusions.

“Transparency-ists,” on the other hand, seek to provide all of the pertinent data to be transparent with the historical records.

The way that Neville treats matters of Church history—how and when the hill in New York came to be called Cumorah, what sacred instruments Joseph Smith used to translate the Book of Mormon, and so forth—it’s no wonder that his followers interpret these issues as he does. He provides them with selective evidence that supports his conclusion, rather than the widest possible range of evidences that paint a larger picture and cast doubt on his iconoclastic views.

—Peter Pan