Jonathan Neville tried to blackmail me

This is not a post I wanted to write. Unfortunately, it’s become necessary because Jonathan Neville has threatened to team up with anti-Mormon critics to attack me and my character unless I take down this entire blog.

(TL;DR version)

I’ll begin with some context:

Bill Reel’s podcast

On April 14, 2023, ex-Mormon podcaster Bill Reel hosted a 2 hour and 46 minute (!) YouTube livestream with the intent to (from the video’s description) “expose the shocking story of how a group of 5 white LDS apologists fabricated and perpetuated a fictional black apologist, Richard Nygren, to provide cover for one of their own. Through detailed investigation and interviews with key players, we reveal the disturbing truth behind this deceitful act and its coverup as well as the impact it has on those involved and on the Mormon apologetic community.”

The truth behind Reel’s breathless hyperbole is not nearly as interesting or dramatic as he tried to make it, and none of the supposed “key players” responded to his requests for information (unless Reel was referring to Jonathan Neville, in which case I’m not surprised). In addition to denying Reel’s spin that I or anyone else “perpetuated a fictional black apologist,” I also categorically state that neither I nor anyone else mentioned in Reel’s video made any fake Richard Nygren profiles on YouTube or any other social media platform, website, or online chat.

That didn’t stop Reel from “grinning ear to ear” when he found a story he could spin to attack and defame a few Latter-day Saints. And his lackeys naturally ate up everything he said, making equally reprehensible comments in the live chat, including some loathsome attempts to dox me by posting my home address.

Bill Reel, probably

Because of Bill Reel’s video, I’ve received harassing messages from disturbed individuals accusing me of being a racist. Some of these messages have contained what could be considered threats. I won’t post those messages here, as they may be evidence if one of these people decides to follow through on their statements.

Normally, I would just ignore Reel’s video—“don’t feed the trolls,” and so forth. These deranged lunatics are obsessed with destroying people who believe in the restored gospel, and they experience no twinge of conscience when they distort the truth.

But then Jonathan Neville jumped on Bill Reel’s bandwagon.

Jonathan Neville promotes Bill Reel’s video

Jonathan Neville—who refuses to read anything I’ve written or to watch my interview with Robert Boylan—was apparently more than happy to watch Bill Reel’s podcast, because he posted about it on his blog.

In his blog post, Neville asserted:

Prominent members of the citation cartel concocted, promoted and perpetuated a fake blogger persona named ‘Peter Pan’ to attack me on an ad hominem blog that ridicules my family name.

Just about every word of that sentence is false.

• There were no “prominent members” of anything involved with the creation and maintaining of this blog; it was solely my idea, and I alone am responsible for it.
• By “promoted,” Neville is referring to Daniel Peterson sharing links to this blog on his own site from time to time. He did this not because he’s been involved in the creation or operation of this blog, but because Jonathan Neville has attacked him and other scholars with weird claims that they’re part of some conspiracy to promulgate “M2C” within the Church.
• If Neville wants to call writing a blog under a pseudonym using “a fake blogger persona,” then I’m afraid to tell him that many blogs are pseudonymous, many famous authors have written under pseudonyms, and even many early American Founders wrote pseudonymously. (I certainly don’t consider this blog to be on the level of Thomas Paine’s anonymously published Common Sense, of course.) As I’ve stated before, I used a pseudonym to protect myself from unstable people—a decision that has now proven itself to be prophetic, as I’ll explain in a moment.
• To the best of my knowledge, I’ve never “attacked” Jonathan Neville on this blog. I’ve at times been sarcastic or snarky, but I’ve always tried to focus on his claims and assertions, not on his person. If anyone can give me examples of where I’ve “attacked” him, please let me know in the comments below; if there are legitimate examples, I’ll gladly remove them and apologize.
• The name of this blog is not “ad hominem,” because that’s not what ad hominem means.
• This is the first time that Neville has alleged that the name Neville-Neville Land “ridicules [his] family name.” It’s strange that he’s waited this long to make an issue about it; this blog has existed for over four years, and only now he’s bringing this up? It seems to me that he’s desperately seeking some opportunity to criticize me.

Amid his many other claims, Neville also asserted in his blog post:

For years, these guys have been falsely accusing Heartlanders of racist motives when it is they themselves who used a phony and racist persona to mislead their own readers and followers (and donors, in the case of Dan Peterson).

This is a rather audacious claim, considering that Rian Nelson on the FIRM Foundation’s blog has made repeated antisemitic statements, statements that Neville himself has shrugged off by writing, “Lots of people think crazy things, and normally that doesn’t matter because we recognize that none of us is perfect.”

Neither Jonathan Neville nor Bill Reel cared when the FIRM Foundation was posting vile, racist antisemitism on a regular basis. Only after Daniel Peterson blogged about it did Neville address it, with a response that equates to, "Yeah, that’s not great, but it’s just Rian being Rian.” But now that they think they’ve got me dead to rights, suddenly the mere mention of a fictitious Black man has them screaming “EMERGENCY! RACISM! DANGER!” Actual incendiary antisemitism is something they’re happy to overlook and excuse, but merely mentioning a nonexistent Black man as part of a joke is apparently beyond the pale. Hypocrisy much?

One could reasonably accuse Reel and Neville of being nothing more than deplorable opportunists.

And, as I’ve already stated, I’ve never used a “racist persona” in any way on any platform. Claims that I or anyone I know has done so are absolutely false.

My personal request to Jonathan Neville

After I saw Neville’s blog post, I sent him the following email on April 18, 2023. I asked him to not share this message online out of respect for my family’s privacy, but unfortunately I’m now forced to post it publicly to provide context for Neville’s response. (I’ve made a few slight changes to my email to remove some sensitive, personal information about my family. The message and intent of the email has not been altered. You can read a screenshot of my email, with redactions.)

Brother Neville,

I notice that you have blogged approvingly about Bill Reel’s video about me.

Setting Reel’s egregiously false spin on these events aside for the moment, his video invades my privacy by discussing in general terms where I live and work. (He lives in the same part of Southern Utah that I do.) Several comments in his YouTube video have tried to dox me by providing my home address and links to information about me on my employer’s website.

I have already received several harassing messages from people who have seen the video. These I can deal with, but they have troubled my family members. They have been terrified by what sound like threats and worried about disturbed individuals showing up at our home uninvited.

I’ve already reported Reel’s YouTube video as harassing me, but it seems unlikely that they’ll do anything about it.

I’m asking you, as a fellow Latter-day Saint and on behalf of my family, to please remove your blog posts linking to Reel’s video. The less advertisement his salacious trash can get, the better.

Kind regards,

Mike Parker

Jonathan Neville’s response and attempt to blackmail me

Neville has so far responded to my email three times. The first reply came on the afternoon of April 18th. (I’ve made two slight changes to his email to remove some sensitive, personal information about my family. The message and intent of the email has not been altered. You can read a screenshot of his email, with redactions.)

I certainly won’t say anything about your email here (although you felt free to publicize my private email to you), but I can’t tell if you’re serious in your request about deleting my post.

I’m sorry for your family members’ distress, but you didn’t care about the impact of your blog on my family, did you? For years, you and Dan have been ridiculing my family name. None of my children, extended family, friends, ward members, or anyone outside of your Interpreters pals thought you were funny, cute or clever (or honorable, Christian, etc.).

If you completely delete your blog, and ask Dan (and the rest of the Interpreters) to do the same with his (their) links to it, I would gladly remove my blog post because then I would have no reason to leave up my posts and links to Bill’s video that explains your blog and alter ego (Peter Pan). I could unwind my observations about Dan as well.

Then, if you’re willing, we could have a cordial and brotherly exchange of views on a neutral site. I would welcome that. And I’m sure our Church leaders would be relieved, as well.

What do you think?

Best,

Jonathan

Thirteen minutes letter, he followed up with another short message. (This has not been edited in any way. You can read a screenshot of his email.)

BTW, your email was timely. I was about to upload a follow-up post on all of this. I’ll defer that, pending your response.

Jonathan Neville does not seemingly recognize any distinctive difference between a pun that he finds personally offensive and a video that distorts the truth and exposes me and my family to unbalanced individuals who may wish to harm us. Got it.

And he will remove one blog post only if I completely delete my entire blog and ask Daniel Peterson and everyone else who has linked to it to remove their posts. I don’t know about you, but that seems a bit disproportionate to me.

But it gets worse. On the morning of April 19, 2023, he emailed me again with the subject “Decision time”. (This has not been edited, except to redact his personal phone number. You can read a screenshot of his email, with phone number redacted.)

Hi Mike. I postponed my follow-up in post light of your request, but I have to assume your silence means you don’t want to work through this.

You may think this is all about your southern Utah dispute with Bill Reel, but thanks to Dan Peterson’s promotion of your blog, I’ve heard about Peter Pan from as far away as Europe and Australia. People deserve to know the background as Bill explained it. Unfortunately, the critics are having a field day with it. Your Peter Pan stunt has managed to give Bill a lot of credibility by reinforcing the stereotypes of LDS apologists, while making Dan and the rest of the Interpreters look like racist fools. Bill has had over 8,000 views in just 4 days, which makes it one of his biggest videos so far, and John Dehlin will undoubtedly do an episode.

This can go two ways, your choice.

One, I can accept the invites I’ve already had and do more podcasts, blogs, etc. From my perspective, the whole “Peter Pan” fiasco epitomizes the problems with the Dan Peterson approach to apologetics, so I’m happy to discuss the topic until that changes.

Two, we can use this situation as a path to reconciliation, eliminate the contention, and discuss the issues in a reasonable, friendly, cordial way that models the “unity in diversity” approach I’ve been seeking all along. That would defuse the critics and demonstrate a new, healthy, noncontentious form of apologetics.

Your choice.

What do you want to do?

Call me any time. 801-███-████.

Best,

Jonathan

“This can go two ways, your choice.”

Jonathan Neville has explicitly threatened me that, unless I delete my entire blog, he’ll go on anti-Mormon podcasts and attack me and my character. Not to rebut my arguments or refute my claims, but to promote the false narrative about me “as Bill [Reel] explained it.”

“I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.”

The “honorable, Christian” thing to do would have been for him to simply remove his blog post to help prevent the spread of misinformation and threats against my family. Instead, Jonathan Neville chose the nuclear option: Do what he says or he’ll go on a campaign of personal destruction using the platforms of enemies of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

For years, Neville and his associates have misrepresented and abused fellow Latter-day Saints. He’s been dishonest and stabbed people in the back whenever they have tried to open a dialog with him. Now he’s allowing himself to be used as a tool by anti-Mormon critics who want to destroy everything he supposedly believes just to get back at me for supposedly hurting his feelings. This tells me everything I need to know about his moral character.

Jonathan Neville and Bill Reel accuse me of being a racist because of a joke that I myself didn’t make, didn’t repeat, and didn’t do anything to disseminate. Meanwhile, Neville has hand-waved away explicit and repeated antisemitic statements made by one of his own friends and associates with the excuse that “people are complicated.” His hypocrisy knows no bounds.

My attempt to correspond with him was a mistake, as he is clearly an unprincipled individual.

Mr. Neville: Please go ahead and ally yourself with anti-Mormons; this will help people like me warn the Saints about what kind of person you really are.

The blog stays up.

—Mike Parker [“Peter Pan”]
 
Postscript: After I published this blog post, Jonathan Neville emailed me under the subject line “Seriously?”, protesting that he had “proposed reconciliation” and objecting to my claim that he tried to blackmail me. I doubt that he’s actually read this post, and I honestly don’t care anymore. I’m not going to correspond with him further, as he’s either dishonest or he doesn’t understand the obvious implications of what he himself writes.
 

It’s all so tiresome

When I started this blog, I legitimately hoped that, by pointing out the errors in Jonathan Neville’s arguments and methods, he would come to understand how misguided and offensive his manner is and perhaps moderate his approach.

Three-and-a-half years later, I am not so sanguine. He continues to misrepresent the arguments and the motivations those who disagree with him. He continues to call for mutual respect and to tolerate different points of view while simultaneously presuming the worst about his opponents.

One example of this is the terms that he uses to describe those on the other side. One of these is the acronym SITH, which stands for “stone in the hat,” referring to the (overwhelming) historical evidence that Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon by using a seer stone that he placed into a hat. The term “Sith” comes from the fictional Star Wars universe; it describes “an ancient order of Force-wielders devoted to the dark side [who] practice hate, deception, and greed…[and] look to amass power at all costs.”

This is not an innocent coincidence. Jonathan Neville knows the connection the word Sith has to great evil: In one of his earliest blog posts in which he used the term, he included photos of Star Wars-related media and used the phrase “the revenge of the SITH,” a reference to the title of the 2005 Star Wars movie. He’s deliberately using this acronym to describe those who disagree with him because it implies they are evil.

And yet Neville still protests his innocence and claims that all of this is just for convenience: “Some people don’t like these acronyms,” he writes, “and I’m happy to consider alternatives, but for now…SITH = stone-in-the-hat theory.” This is a lie. He is not going to “consider alternatives.” He knows exactly what he’s doing, and the evidence clearly shows that he’s doing it deliberately.

Amidst all of this, Neville continually—and hypocritically—pleads for disagreements to be “handled charitably.” That was the focus of two recent blog posts (here and here) in which he called for “respect [for] other perspectives, interpretations, beliefs, etc.,” while in the very same post calling the BYU Virtual Scriptures conceptual Book of Mormon map a “fantasy map,” claiming his opponents’ beliefs are “based on the premise that Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery were ignorant, naive, or deceitful,” and asserting that “the citation cartel”—(another derogatory term he uses frequently)—“obscures and censors sources so that people cannot make informed decisions.”

It requires either a massive amount of chutzpah or a total lack of self-awareness to plead for respect and charity while simultaneously resorting to name-calling and misrepresenting one’s ideological opponents.

The evidence sadly suggests that Jonathan Neville is not going to stop doing these things or even tone down his rhetoric. If anything, Neville’s recent appearance on Steven Pynakker’s Mormon Book Reviews YouTube channel shows that he’s doubling down on his approach in the wake of Spencer Kraus’s incisive reviews of his recent books.

My interpretation of all of this is that Jonathan Neville is allowing himself to become more and more convinced that Church leaders are going to come crawling to him, telling him that he’s been right about everything and pleading with him to come cast out the evil historians and save us all with his brilliance. But the phone keeps not ringing, so he has to keep ramping up the hyperbole to show the world how sincere and right he is. (See, for example, his recent blog post “Yet another SITH video!” in which he accuses the Church of the “suppression” of “what Joseph and Oliver taught.”) Neville’s latest interview with Pynakker doesn’t help, because Pynakker just feeds Neville’s sense of self-importance by telling him there is a time coming for him to shine, calling this approaching moment “the hour of Jonathan.” “the Jonathan Neville moment.”*

If my reading of these tea leaves is correct, then Jonathan Neville is following a well-trodden path that many would-be ark-steadiers` have walked before him. This road never leads to good ends.

—Peter Pan
 
* I inadvertantly misquoted Pynakker when I posted this blog. Pynakker pointed this out recently, and I’ve corrected the error. (Although, to be honest, I don’t see a qualitative difference between “the hour of Jonathan” and “the Jonathan Neville moment.”) —November 11, 2022.

Jonathan Neville continues to assert that the Church is “out of the way”

In his October 1965 general conference address, Elder Harold B. Lee warned the members of the Church:

There are those among us who would set themselves up as critics of the Church, saying that the Church has gone out of the way. Some splintered apostate clans even from the beginning of this dispensation have made fictitious claims to authority. We should warn these, as well as those who are in danger of being led astray of what the Prophet [Joseph Smith] predicted. He said, “That man who rises up to condemn others, finding fault with the Church saying they are out of the way, while he himself is righteous, then know assuredly that that man is [on the way] to apostasy and if he does not repent, [he] will apostatize, as God lives.”

In April 1989, Elder (now President) Dallin H. Oaks warned the Saints about “alternate voices” who “speak of…the doctrines, ordinances, and practices of his church,” but do so “without calling or authority”:

The Church does approve or disapprove those publications that are to be published or used in the official activities of the Church, general or local. For example, we have procedures to ensure approved content for materials published in the name of the Church or used for instruction in its classes. These procedures can be somewhat slow and cumbersome, but they have an important benefit. They provide a spiritual quality control that allows members to rely on the truth of what is said. Members who listen to the voice of the Church need not be on guard against being misled. They have no such assurance for what they hear from alternate voices.

Elder Lee’s warning about “those among us” who criticize the Church and Elder Oaks’ warning about “alternate voices” both firmly apply to Jonathan Neville, who continually criticizes the Church, its leaders, and its publications. His July 14, 2022, blog post, “The Rising Generation, SITH and the GTE,” is rife with examples of this. For the sake of brevity, I’ll share just the following excerpt.

Note how different Neville’s evaluation of Church publications is to the one given to us by Elder Oaks:

Not only has Cumorah been censored from the Saints book, volume 1, but the teachings of Joseph and Oliver about the Urim and Thummim have been all but erased as well.

A prime example is the Gospel Topics Essay on Book of Mormon Translation as we’ll discuss below. This essay has been criticized by outsiders, but it is more problematic from a faithful perspective.

There are two aspects of the Gospel Topics Essays that people seem to overlook.

1. They were written by committee, published anonymously, and are not canonized.
2. They are subject to revision at any time without notice, and have been revised from time to time in the past.

These two aspects lead me to hope and propose that the essays continue to be improved. As it is now, the Translation essay misleads readers—particularly the rising generation.

…

[Joseph Smith] never said or implied that he dictated the Book of Mormon from words that appeared on the stone in the hat (SITH).

But the rising generation does not know any of this.

They are not being taught to refer to original sources but instead are led to the Saints books and to the Gospel Topics Essay on Book of Mormon Translation.

That essay omits and edits important, relevant original sources, including the teachings of the prophets, to promote the narrative generated by David Whitmer and others, contrary to the plain teachings of Joseph, Oliver, and their successors in Church leadership.

Just in this brief excerpt of his much longer blog post, Jonathan Neville has:

• Accused Church employees of censoring the historical record in official Church publications.
• Accused Church publications of being “problematic from a faithful perspective.”
• Downplayed the authority of the Gospel Topics Essays. (This, despite the Church’s explicit statement that the Gospel Topics Essays “have been approved by the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles,” something I pointed out three years ago.)
• Hand-waved the Essays’ authority away on the spurious basis that they can be and have been revised. (Every position of the Church is subject to revision as “further light and knowledge” are received, either from divine or earthly sources. The Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants have been revised; that doesn’t in any way lessen their authoritative status.)
• Accused the Gospel Topics Essay on Book of Mormon translation of “mislead[ing] [its] readers.”
• Accused Church publications of misleading the youth of the Church (“the rising generation”) by teaching them to ignore original sources.
• Accused Church publications of “omitting” and “editing” sources so they are “contrary to the plain teachings” of Joseph Smith and other early Church leaders.

Please explain to me how Neville’s statements do not clearly fit Elder Lee’s warning about “those among us who would set themselves up as critics of the Church, saying that the Church has gone out of the way.”

Please explain to me how Neville’s statements do not explicitly call into question Elder Oaks’s witness that Church publications have “a spiritual quality control that allows members to rely on the truth of what is said.”

I am not claiming that Church publications are perfect. Everything produced by mortals is fallible, including scripture. There’s a difference, however, between (a) having concerns about or disagreements with specific articles published by the Church and (b) claiming that there is a conspiracy within the Church to suppress all teaching about a specific pet doctrine that one espouses. There will of course be errors in Church publications, and most publications will eventually be superseded by newer ones that correct these errors. But claiming that the entire Church is off the rails on supposedly important matters of doctrine and history is where Neville goes horribly wrong.

His approach can and will lead people in only one direction: into apostasy and out of the Church.

—Peter Pan
 

“It must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!”

(The title of this post is drawn from Matthew 18:7.)

According to Jonathan Neville, the problem isn’t that he not-so-subtly compared Daniel Peterson to Satan; the problem is Daniel Peterson for taking offense at Neville not-so-subtly comparing him to Satan:

Apparently Dan got offended because a previous post on this blog discussed one of his articles and the origins of the Interpreter.

Dan’s awesome. He’s a long-time faithful Latter-day Saint, a wonderful person, a talented scholar, etc. with a devoted following. Most of what he writes is great. He could be even more productive if he was open to faithful interpretations of Church history and the Book of Mormon other than M2C and SITH.

His reputation for taking offense is legendary, however, and it detracts from his overall message.

First of all, take a look at Daniel Peterson’s mention of Neville’s slur. Does his mild, bemused post sound anything like he “got offended”? And by what measure does Neville judge Peterson for supposedly having a “legendary” “reputation for taking offense”? I’ve been reading Peterson’s work—in print and online—for nearly thirty years; I’ve never seen the kind of behavior that Neville ascribes to him.

More to the point, a kind and generous human being would apologize for using temple language to equate a fellow Latter-day Saint to Satan. Jonathan Neville, instead, chose to blame the target of his slander.

—Peter Pan
 

Would someone please explain this to me?

I’ve previously mentioned Jonathan Neville’s odd sense of humor. (Honestly, I don’t think he understands what a meme is and is not.)

But while funny and unfunny are subjective, attempts at humor should at least be intelligible.

Can someone please explain this to me?

That’s not just unfunny; it doesn’t even make sense. Since the “M2C”* conspiracy is very real (at least in Neville’s own mind), is the meme claiming that I also exist? (Because, obviously I do.) Or is it claiming that the fictional character of Peter Pan exists? (If so, I worry about Neville’s sanity.)

Maybe what he means by it is “the Mesoamerican setting for the Book of Mormon isn’t real and neither is the fictional character of Peter Pan.” This might explain the meme, but I still question if it’s funny or even clever.

Neville calls that meme “a popular favorite.” By what measure does he deem it so? Did he take a poll of his readers? It’s brand new, so he can’t be going off of page views. This is all simply bizarre.

In the same blog post, Neville uploaded this image:

His Venn diagram drawing is a non sequitur. The Neville-Neville Land blog quotes him and links to his own writings. My readers can evaluate for themselves if I’ve misrepresented him, but in two-and-a-half years, no one—not even Neville himself—has even attempted to demonstrate if or how I’ve done so.

—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.
 

Jonathan Neville is simply disingenuous

The short version:

Jonathan Neville accused Daniel Peterson of using anti-Mormon claims in the Witnesses film and keeping controversy going because it “generate[s] donations.”

Daniel Peterson took issue with both claims and (correctly) said that Neville was accusing him of priestcraft.

Neville’s response? “I didn't accuse Dan of anything.”

How Neville can claim that publicly and sleep at night is simply beyond me.

—Peter Pan
 

Jonathan Neville abuses Oliver Cowdery once again

There are times when I question Jonathan Neville’s ability to read and understand even the most unambiguous historical texts.

Here’s the latest example, from his May 18, 2021, blog post, “Bottom line on M2C.” Critics of the Heartland hoax (including this humble blog) point out that Oliver Cowdery never claimed the location of the hill Cumorah was revealed by God when he wrote, in 1834, “When one reflects on the fact, that here, between these hills, the entire power and national strength of both the Jaredites and Nephites were destroyed.” Neville counters:

Some say Oliver Cowdery never claimed revelation when he wrote Letter VII. But he also never claimed revelation when he described the visit of John the Baptist, the translation of the Book of Mormon, or other events. He simply reported what happened. Having visited the repository of Nephite records in the Hill Cumorah, how could Oliver not say it was a fact that the Cumorah of Mormon 6:6 was the same hill in New York where Joseph found the plates? The factual nature of Oliver’s report, coming as it did to refute claims the Book of Mormon was fiction, makes it more, not less, credible.

The sentence I’ve formatted in boldface is simply staggering. Here Neville has asserted that Oliver Cowdery’s passing remark about “the fact” of the New York Cumorah being the last battleground of the Book of Mormon people must be taken as revealed by God because—and I quote—Oliver “also never claimed revelation when he described the visit of John the Baptist, the translation of the Book of Mormon, or other events.”

How Neville could make such a claim is simply beyond all comprehension. Perhaps we should just leave it to Oliver Cowdery to demonstrate how accurate Neville is:

Neville: “[Oliver Cowdery] never claimed revelation when he described the visit of John the Baptist.”

Oliver Cowdery (Letter I; cf. Joseph Smith—History 1:71 fn.):

Can any thinking individual honestly claim that the voice of Jesus Christ speaking from the heavens and the appearance of an angel from God was not a “revelation”?

Neville: “[Oliver Cowdery] never claimed revelation when he described…the translation of the Book of Mormon.”

Oliver Cowdery (Letter I; cf. Joseph Smith—History 1:71 fn.):

Can any thinking individual honestly claim that “a voice dictated by the inspiration of heaven” was not a “revelation”?

Neville: “[Oliver Cowdery] never claimed revelation when he described…other events.”

Oliver Cowdery (Joseph Smith, Journal, 3 April 1836; cf. D&C 110:1–4):

Can any thinking individual honestly claim that Oliver Cowdery “never claimed revelation when he described…other events,“ when here is an account written by Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery in which they testified that they both saw and heard the Lord Jesus Christ?


How can Jonathan Neville be so far off the mark? These are basic, fundamental historical accounts that Neville himself has quoted numerous times on his own blogs!

More to the point, how can Neville compare any of these three supernal accounts from Oliver Cowdery to his passing mention of a supposed “fact” in Letter VII?

It simply boggles the mind that Jonathan Neville can be so careless in his statements, so irresponsible in his treatment of the historical record.

Even worse, it boggles the mind that any thinking Latter-day Saint would take what he claims seriously.

—Peter Pan
 

Jonathan Neville maligns the Church’s Come, Follow Me manual

Jonathan Neville has no qualms about openly criticizing official publications of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints:

• He has stated that “Church employees and departments are censoring information at various levels,” and “they are even depriving Church leaders and members of important information and perspectives.”
• He’s implied that Church employees are behaving like the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
• He’s repeatedly criticized material published in Church magazines—including articles written by general authorities—and suggested that members steer investigators and interested nonmembers away from official Church publications because these materials supposedly teach falsehoods.
• He has an entire blog dedicated to criticizing Saints, the Church’s new official published history.
• He’s repeatedly sought to discredit the Church’s Gospel Topics essays.
• He even believes that Church leaders themselves are misleading the Saints.

To all of the above, we can add Neville’s repeated criticism of the Come, Follow Me curriculum. He has asserted that these materials “are not doctrine, they are subject to change at any time without notice, and even the Brethren don’t always know what they contain before they are published.” (Neville seemingly believes that the First Presidency are dupes who are “asleep at the wheel” and allowing apostate teachings to be published by the Church.)

On February 24, 2021, Neville added to all the above another blog post in which he claimed that the 2021 Come, Follow Me manual is “misleading” the Saints and shouldn’t be trusted:

A lot of what we think is a difference in opinions is really a difference in knowledge. People think their opinions are based on fact, but that’s usually a delusion—especially when they don’t have all the facts.

And, as much as we wish it was not the case, we are not getting all the facts from current correlated Church history.

The Come[,] Follow Me 2021 manual is the latest example, but that’s because it is correlated with the Saints book.

In a way, this doesn’t matter. It’s funny, even, that our historians think they can mislead us this easily. Every member of the Church has responsibility to study these things and reach our own conclusions. Delegating our study to our historians, and then believing what they tell us, is a colossal mistake.

True, we should be able to trust them. But they have an agenda different from ours.

According to Neville, Church scholars and Church employees think they know the facts, but they’ve been deluded. Neville, however, has the facts and is not deluded.

Even more disturbing, though, is Neville’s assertion that “our historians think they can mislead us this easily.” In other words, he’s arguing that historians employed by the Church are wilfully and purposely trying to “mislead” the Saints because “they have an agenda [that is] different from ours.”

Here again we see Neville flirting with apostasy. The General Handbook of the Church defines apostasy as “repeatedly acting in clear and deliberate public opposition to the Church, its doctrine, its policies, or its leaders.” If publicly and repeatedly criticizing Church leaders, Church employees, and Church publications in the manner Neville has been doing for years now isn’t apostasy, then what is it?

—Peter Pan
 

Jonathan Neville sows doubt, blames others

Jonathan Neville’s February 5, 2021, blog post, “Multiple hypotheses-Cumorah,” is, once again, about the absolutely critical need for the hill Cumorah of Book of Mormon to be the same hill where Joseph Smith unearthed the plates of Mormon in 1827. In this post, he repeats many of his usual misrepresentations of the evidence and counterarguments, then closes with this startling statement:

True, for the last two decades or so, Church leaders have been silent about Cumorah. But is that because they disagree with their predecessors, because they aren’t sure whether or not to agree, or because the scholars have used the academic cycle to persuade Church members to reject these teachings?

Why don’t living prophets and apostles teach the New York location of Cumorah? Neville gives us three possibilities:

1. They disagree with earlier leaders on this teaching and believe “M2C.”*
2. They’re unsure if the New York Cumorah or “M2C” is the correct theory.
3. Academics have blinded them to the truth.

All three of his proffered options don’t increase faith in the authority and testimony of living prophets. Once again, Neville has cast doubt on the knowledge, understanding, and testimonies of living prophets concerning what he thinks is a vitally important doctrine of the Book of Mormon.

What’s ironic about this is that, in the very same blog post, Neville asserts (without providing a shred of evidence) that many people are leaving the Church today because of “M2C”:

It is common knowledge that many formerly faithful Latter-day Saints are leaving the Church. Few, if any, leave with an intact testimony of the Book of Mormon.

What causes people to lose faith in the Book of Mormon?

As Joseph Fielding Smith explained, the two-Cumorahs theory causes members to “become confused and disturbed in their faith in the Book of Mormon.”

Here again we see Neville committing the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc, also referred to as “correlation does not imply causation.” His fallacious conclusion is:

• “It is common knowledge that many formerly faithful Latter-day Saints are leaving the Church.” [An argumentum ad populum fallacy.]
• “Few, if any, leave with an intact testimony of the Book of Mormon.”
• “M2C” causes people to lose faith in the Book of Mormon. [An unfounded assertion based entirely on appeal to authority.]
• Therefore, “M2C” causes people to leave the Church.

It’s disturbing how Neville persists in continually writing blog posts that are critical of the Church and its leaders (in a passive-aggressive way, of course) and yet also asserts that it’s actually his intellectual opponents who are to blame for loss of faith in the restored gospel.

—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.

Jonathan Neville’s passive–aggressive personality

In a post the other day, I mentioned Jonathan Neville’s “continual posting of passive–aggressive statements.” He dropped another blog post today that perfectly reflects this, so I thought I’d use that as an example of his style.

For those who aren’t familiar with the term or are are uncertain of the definition of passive–aggressive:

Passive–aggressive behavior is when you express negative feelings indirectly instead of openly talking about them.…

Someone who uses passive aggression may feel angry, resentful, or frustrated, but they act neutral, pleasant, or even cheerful. They then find indirect ways to show how they really feel.

Examples of passive aggression show up in most of Neville’s blog posts. Most often, they’re reflected in how he refers to those who disagree with Heartlander views of Book of Mormon geography and the hill Cumorah.

In his October 19, 2020, blog post “Logos and perspective,” he criticizes Book of Mormon Central’s use of a Mayan glyph in their logo. (This is the same logo that was formerly used by the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies.)

In this post, Neville tells us:

Those who read my blogs know that I have great respect and fondness for the members of the M2C* citation cartel. All those I’ve met are great people, sincere, dedicated, smart, etc.

While I disagree with their interpretations of the text and the relevant extrinsic evidence, it doesn’t bother me in the least that other people have different opinions.

Despite his supposed “respect and fondness” for these “great people” with whom he disagrees, he persists in referring to them as “the M2C citation cartel.” That term that is not just inaccurate; one can also reasonably infer from its use that he is comparing his opponents to an international crime syndicate.

Neville responded to that concern back on September 3rd, not by apologizing and changing his terminology, but by making any offense taken at the use of the term “cartel” the fault of those who interpreted it in a negative light (!):

Apparently some of the members of the M2C citation cartel…consider the acronym “M2C” pejorative, and they think the term “citation cartel” invokes images of drug cartels in Latin America.

Such paranoia is a good example of how members (and employees) of a citation cartel think and operate. The credentialed class all too often take personal offense to differences of opinion, resort to academic bullying, and employ censorship to protect their intellectual cartels.

So, according to Neville, the problem isn’t his choice to use potentially offensive words; the problem is those who take offense, because they are “paranoid,” “resort to academic bullying, and employ censorship”—a textbook example of blame-shifting.

Back to his October 19th post:

After expressing his “respect and fondness” for these “great people” with whom he disagrees—as well as claiming that the matter is “a simple difference of perspective” and accepting “diversity of thought”—he then proceeds to belittle and disparage these “great people”:

• He claims that, for people such as himself, the Book of Mormon Central logo “represents completely closed minds and bias confirmation presented in the guise of scholarship.”
• He claims “this logo is the antithesis of the Church’s position of neutrality.” (A subject that he completely misunderstands or continually misrepresents.)
• He calls the “great people” who work for Book of Mormon Central “hirelings,” a defamatory term that refers to “a person who works only for pay, especially in a menial or boring job, with little or no concern for the value of the work.” (These “hirelings” are the same people he has referred to as “fine young scholars” nearly seventy times in other passive–aggressive posts.)
• These “hirelings,” he tells us, “spend their time trying to convince Church members that the prophets are wrong,” and Book of Mormon Central’s logo “represents a deliberate choice to repudiate the teachings of the prophets about the New York Cumorah.” Yet this completely contradicts his earlier claim that these same people are “sincere” and “dedicated”!

“Once those who identify themselves with this M2C logo understand how the rest of us perceive it,” Neville concludes, ”maybe they will be a little more understanding of our point of view.”

Absolutely incredible. Neville longs for people who are part of the “M2C citation cartel” to understand how he and other Heartlanders perceive its meaning, yet he himself is completely unaware of how deeply insulting he is—over, and over, and over again—toward them.

“Unlike some of my critics,” he writes, “I don’t resort to name-calling, accusations of apostasy, etc.” Yet he calls those with whom he disagrees “hirelings” in the very same post.

When I claim that Neville and his cohorts are flirting with apostasy, I’m not “resorting” to anything—I mean it. For evidence of this, look no further than his other post today on one of his other blogs where he criticizes Saints, the Church’s new official history with a foreword by the First Presidency: In that post he clearly implies that the Church historians who wrote Saints are like employees of the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The Church’s General Handbook defines apostasy as “repeatedly acting in clear and deliberate public opposition to the Church, its doctrine, its policies, or its leaders.” If Neville’s continual public opposition to the way the Church’s leaders and historians describe its history isn’t apostasy, then I don’t know what else one could legitimately call it.

—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.

He whose name shall not be mentioned

More than a week after October 2020 General Conference, Jonathan Neville has finally gotten around to acknowledging the matter of Elder Gerrit W. Gong’s comment in the Saturday afternoon session regarding “Mary Whitmer, the faithful sister to whom Moroni showed the Book of Mormon plates.”

I use the term acknowledging because Neville barely mentions it at all; instead, he brushes past it without dealing with any of its implications. His comments are limited to a mere 58 words in a 2,683-word blog post. (That’s a mere 2.2% by word count.)

The issue has resurfaced because in the October 2020 General Conference, one of the speakers repeated the story, citing Saints as authority. (I won’t mention the speaker’s name out of respect.)

Right in the same talk, the speaker described Moroni as “as a glorious messenger from God,” which is consistent with the description of Moroni in Letter IV.

Notice how Neville didn’t mention either the speaker’s name nor the office he holds; he didn’t even mention if the speaker was male or female. One could get the impression from his post that it was a newly-called Seventy or a counselor in an auxiliary presidency who made the offending remark. But the speaker was an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ, one of fifteen men Neville supposedly sustains as a prophet, seer, and revelator.

“It is proposed that we sustain one of the speakers, whose name we won’t mention.”

By avoiding using Elder Gong’s name or mentioning his priesthood office, Neville less-than-deftly sidesteps all of the serious implications of his dogmatic insistence that the personage who appeared to Mary Whitmer was Nephi. For someone who insists that his ideological opponents teach that “the prophets were wrong,” Neville is awkwardly unwilling to admit that of himself. Instead, he just moves right along in his blog post to yet another rambling diatribe about the “M2C”* conspiracy, his assertion that Latter-day Saint scholars are denying what Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery taught, etc., without explicitly implicating Elder Gong in those heresies but clearly leaving the reader to infer exactly that.

This is yet more evidence that Jonathan Neville, like his Heartlander comrades, clings to the selected teachings of dead prophets while rejecting the teachings of living prophets. Again and again this blog has demonstrated that Neville’s teachings are not in harmony with those of President Russell M. Nelson (1, 2, 3), President M. Russell Ballard (4), Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf (5), Elder Quinten L. Cook (6), Elder LeGrand R. Curtis Jr. (7), and now Elder Gerrit W. Gong. He’s implied that Church leaders are withholding vital truths from Church members. He’s implied that the Brethren are ignorant of lies that are being fed to them by Church employees.

If this isn’t clear evidence that he’s on the road to apostasy, then I don’t know what is.

—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.

Jonathan Neville at the gates of confusion

In a pair of bizarre blog posts, Jonathan Neville once again completely misunderstands—or perhaps willfully misrepresents—the purpose and use of BYU’s Virtual Book of Mormon map.

First he wrote:

The Book of Mormon gives us several warnings, such as this one:

“And now, we can behold the decrees of God concerning this land, that it is a land of promise; and whatsoever nation shall possess it shall serve God, or they shall be swept off when the fulness of his wrath shall come upon them. And the fulness of his wrath cometh upon them when they are ripened in iniquity.” (Ether 2:9)

But we’re told by our M2C* scholars that the Book of Mormon took place in an imaginary land.

Maybe people aren’t repenting because there is no downside to being “swept off” a fantasy map?

And he followed up on that by writing (with the emphases in his original):

Portraying the Book of Mormon in a fictional setting hardly inspires confidence that the book Joseph translated is an authentic history.

And yet, all LDS youth today are learning this fictional setting for the Book of Mormon in seminary, institute, and at BYU.

This fictional setting is based on the M2C premise that the prophets are wrong because the Hill Cumorah of Mormon 6:6 is in southern Mexico, not in New York.

The M2C citation cartel has established its own M2C interpretation as the de facto official interpretation of the Book of Mormon. They are imprinting this fictional setting on the minds of LDS students around the world.

This is a slow-moving disaster.

It’s difficult for me to grasp the level of ignorance and/or the single-minded devotion to promulgating deceit that are required for him to make such statements, for the truth of the matter can be found right on the home page of the Virtual Book of Mormon:

The Church and BYU stay neutral in questions of exactly where the Book of Mormon took place. The Lord could have removed all questions regarding the exact locations of these events but he did not. For that reason, our design team has chosen to develop an internal map that shows relational directions and approximate distances that match the approximately 550 geography descriptions in the text as closely as possible. These are artistic renditions.

“Relational directions.”

“Artistic renditions.”

It’s manifestly clear—bordering on painfully obvious—to any fair-minded reader that the Virtual Book of Mormon is not implying that the events of the Book of Mormon took place in an “imaginary land” or in a “fictional setting.” Rather, because the Church and BYU remain neutral on the question of the real-world setting of the Book of Mormon—remember, “the Church’s only position is that the events the Book of Mormon describes took place in the ancient Americas”—BYU’s internal map is intended only to show “relational directions and approximate distances.”

To answer the question Neville posed in the title of his first blog post: Those who do not serve God will be swept off of the American continent “when the fulness of his wrath shall come upon them,” for, as the Joseph Smith, Ezra Taft Benson, and Mark E. Petersen taught, North and South America with all its nations encompasses the Lord’s land of Zion.

Neville, in his second blog post, would have us belive “there is an alternative” to the Church’s stated viewpoint of geographic neutrality, namely his “Heartland” maps of the Book of Mormon. He calls these “a sound interpretation of the Book of Mormon,” when they are, in fact, a jumbled mess of forced interpretations of scripture and implausible redefinitions of common terms. On point after point, they fail to align with how the text of the Book of Mormon describes Nephite and Lamanite lands.

Jonathan Neville is not unintelligent or uneducated, which is why it’s so perplexing how he could so badly misrepresent the directly stated purposes and objectives of the BYU Virtual Book of Mormon map. I truly wish I could avoid charging him with outright dishonesty, but I see few, if any, alternatives in this case.

—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.

Neville compares “M2C” to communist brainwashing of POWs

For Jonathan Neville, those who disagree with him about Church history and Book of Mormon geography aren’t just fellow saints with whom he can discuss and debate; they’re are disloyal conspirators who should be attacked and exposed.

Despite all of his continual protestations of how much he “admires and respects” those who don’t share his views, it’s abundantly obvious that he believes they are destroying the Church from within by “poisoning” its members and lying to Church leaders.

He even believes that Church leaders themselves are misleading the saints.

So it doesn’t come as any surprise to see him, in his latest blog post—“Persuasion by small steps” (July 2, 2020)—comparing the teaching of a Mesoamerican Book of Mormon geography and a southern Mexico location for the hill Cumorah to the brainwashing techniques Chinese communists used on American prisoners of war during the Korean conflict.

American POWs at a Chinese camp near the Yalu River are forced to read the Gospel Topics essay on Book of Mormon Geography. B&W; 1951. (Photo courtesy of Jonathan Neville’s imagination.)

(I should point out that Neville’s research about POWs and psychological torture consists entirely of a string of tweets from some random Twitter feed.)

Jonathan Neville clearly believes that the subjects about which he obsesses are a battleground for the heart and soul of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—this in spite the fact that no revelation has been given on the location of the hill Cumorah and that living prophets and apostles have explicitly urged the saints “not to advocate those personal theories” about Book of Mormon geography “in any setting or manner that would imply either prophetic or Church support for those theories.”

—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.

The Church is Big Brother, or something

It’s plainly evident that Jonathan Neville is a conspiracy theorist of the first order. He believes that “Church employees and departments are censoring information at various levels,” and “they are even depriving Church leaders and members of important information and perspectives.”

What’s surprising to me, though, is the levels to which he takes his rhetoric. By his choice of words and use of quotations, he not-so-subtly implies that Church employees are not simply mistaken but are willfully malicious in they way they use their positions to distort the truth.

Here’s just the latest example from Neville’s BookOfMormonCentralAmerica.com blog:

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”

— George Orwell

Despite the Gospel Topics Essay on Translation and the Ensign, there is still at least one page on the Church’s [web] site that claims Joseph [Smith] translated the plates with the Urim and Thummim.

https://history.churchofjesuschrist.org/content/joseph-smith-translates-the-gold-plates?lang=eng

Let’s see how long that stays up.

Good heavens. Let’s break this down, shall we?

1. Neville begins with a quote from George Orwell about the suppression and control of history for propaganda purposes.

Orwell is, of course, best-known as author of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, whose protagonist, Winston Smith, lives in a dystopian, totalitarian state where every individual’s actions are closely monitored and the general populace is fed a steady stream of propaganda and lies from a ruling elite.

Neville’s use of that specific quote from that specific author implies that the same thing is going on today at the headquarters of the Lord’s Church: According to him, Church employees are doing their very best to conceal, cover up, and distort the true history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the teachings of its prophets.

Winston Smith revises Church history in the Ministry of Truth, Salt Lake City, Utah. B&W; 1984.
(Photo courtesy of Jonathan Neville’s imagination.)

2. Neville next claims, by use of a negative, that the Gospel Topics essay on the translation of the Book of Mormon and the the Ensign (the Church’s official English-language magazine) do not teach that “Joseph translated the plates with the Urim and Thummim.”

Now, perhaps Neville was just not being careful with his wording; if so, I invite him to clarify his statement, for, as it now stands, it’s blatantly false.

The Gospel Topics essay most definitely teaches that Joseph used the Urim and Thummim to translate the Book of Mormon:

Joseph Smith and his scribes wrote of two instruments used in translating the Book of Mormon. According to witnesses of the translation, when Joseph looked into the instruments, the words of scripture appeared in English. One instrument, called in the Book of Mormon the “interpreters,” is better known to Latter-day Saints today as the “Urim and Thummim.” Joseph found the interpreters buried in the hill with the plates. Those who saw the interpreters described them as a clear pair of stones bound together with a metal rim. The Book of Mormon referred to this instrument, together with its breastplate, as a device “kept and preserved by the hand of the Lord” and “handed down from generation to generation, for the purpose of interpreting languages.”

And, in an Ensign article from January of this year—an article that Neville heavily criticized—Elder LeGrand Curtis Jr. wrote:

Joseph [Smith] himself did not elaborate about the process of translation, but Oliver [Cowdery], David [Whitmer], and Emma [Smith] provided some additional information. Oliver said: “These were days never to be forgotten—to sit under the sound of a voice dictated by the inspiration of heaven, awakened the utmost gratitude of this bosom! Day after day I continued, uninterrupted, to write from [Joseph’s] mouth, as he translated with the Urim and Thummim, or, as the Nephites would have said, ‘Interpreters,’ the history or record called ‘The Book of Mormon.’”

The “interpreters” used by Joseph during the translation process included the “two stones in silver bows” that were deposited by Moroni with the plates. In addition to these two seer stones, Joseph used at least one other seer stone that the Lord had provided.

These two articles, along with other resources published by the Church (like here, here, and here), are clear that Joseph used the Nephite interpreters to translate the Book of Mormon.

Why, then, does Jonathan Neville feel the need to lie by implying that there is just “one page on the Church’s site that claims Joseph translated the plates with the Urim and Thummim”?

3. The concluding statement of Neville’s introduction—“Let’s see how long that stays up”—again directly implies that Church history is in the process of being changed right before our eyes, and that the “one page” to which he referred could be taken down at any moment because it doesn’t mention Joseph using a seer stone to translate. And so we’re back, once again, to Neville’s grand conspiracy theory.

…

Why do Jonathan Neville and many other leading figures in the “Heartland” Book of Mormon movement lean so heavily on conspiracy theories? There’s no one reason, but psychologists have pointed to confirmation bias, belief perseverance, and the human desire to be uniquely knowledgeable as factors that motivate conspiracy theorists. Being an outsider and shouting at the masses to “wake up!” brings one a sense of comfort, certainty, and authority.

What Neville and his Heartlander comrades don’t seem to realize, though, is that their continual appeals to conspiracies to boost their own presumed authority can only impair the authority of called, sustained, and ordained leaders of the Church and the publications they oversee and authorize. Ironically, Neville’s actions will cause those who follow him to lose trust in the teachings of the prophets that he claims to uphold.

For that reason (among many others), Jonathan Neville’s theories should be rejected by believing Latter-day Saints.

—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.

Jonathan Neville and “the high road to apostacy”

Continuing his longstanding practice of criticizing magazines and Gospel Topics essays published by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Jonathan Neville has unloaded two new blog posts that attack these Church publications for not preaching his heterodox views: “The Restoration and the July 2020 Ensign” (June 23, 2020) and “Review of Gospel Topics Essay on Translation” (June 24, 2020).

This will not be an extensive review of why Neville’s specific criticisms are wrong; rather, I’d simply like to point out the clear marks of his growing apostasy.

Joseph Smith warned the Twelve Apostles in 1839, “That man who rises up to condemn others & finding fault with the Church saying that they are out of the way while he himself is righteous, then know assuredly that that man is in the high road to apostacy & if he does not repent will apostatize as God live[s].” This statement applies at least as much to Jonathan Neville as it has to any other apostate before he or she broke from the Lord’s Church.

In his first blog post, Neville has created yet another table that compares his beliefs with inaccurate and oversimplified versions of the information published by the Church. Neville’s particular beef this time is with the July 2020 issue of the Ensign. He asks his readers:

We are left wondering what to do. Do we share the Ensign with our nonmember friends? Do we tell them the [Ensign’s] narrative in the left column above?

Or do we tell them the [Heartland] narrative in the right column above and encourage them to study the scriptures and the teachings of the prophets?

“We love our Ensign,” he professes, “but sometimes we wonder what’s going on.” The problem, he continues, is the July 2020 issue “discusses Church history in a manner that undermines the faith of many people and impedes missionary work.” Neville provides no evidence that either of his claims are true, of course, other than his usual vague assertion that current Church teachings undermine the historicity of the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith’s status as a prophet (because “M2C”* and “SITH”).

Having examined the July 2020 Ensign and found it wanting, Neville concludes by repeating:

We ask again, do we share the Ensign with our nonmember friends? Do we tell them the narrative in the left column above?

Or do we tell them the narrative in the right column above and encourage them to study the scriptures and the teachings of the prophets?

It’s fairly clear that Neville would answer his rhetorical question by choosing the latter option—as long as people study through the lens of a Heartlander. He’d prefer that people not read the teachings and counsel of modern, living prophets (more on that in a moment) but instead stick with the interpretations of dead prophets that he and his associates make.

In summary, Jonathan Neville is literally suggesting that we steer investigators and interested nonmembers away from official Church publications because they supposedly teach falsehoods.

He begins his second blog post, by quoting—with no apparent sense of irony whatsoever—President Heber J. Grant’s warning, “If you get on a hobby horse it will ride you right out of the Church.”

Neville is, of course, a textbook example of a gospel hobbyist. He is obsessed with rooting out any teaching that the hill Cumorah of the Book of Mormon is not the hill as the one in western New York that goes by the same name. He’s recently adopted a second obsession with insisting that Joseph Smith only used the Nephite interpreters to translate the Book of Mormon and never used a seer stone (despite ample evidence of the latter from many eyewitnesses). That he would claim to having successfully “avoid[ed] getting on a hobby horse” is simply staggering.

In addition to comparing the teaching of Church history in the Gospel Topics essays to Soviet-era propaganda and the works of George Orwell—I am not making this up; read for yourself on his blog—Neville tells us:

In my view, [the Lord has said] plenty regarding the translation and historicity of the Book of Mormon, but certain scholars, along with their employees and their followers, have largely rejected those teachings in favor of their own theories.

Neville completely fails to note that it’s not just scholars and Church employees who believe that Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon with a seer stone, for modern, living prophets, apostles, and other leaders have also taught this very same thing. These prophets include:

• President Russell M. Nelson, 17th President of the Church (2018–present) and an ordained apostle since 1984. (See also here and here.)
• President M. Russell Ballard, Acting President of the Quorum of the Twelve (2018–president) and an ordained apostle since 1985.
• Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf, member of the Quorum of the Twelve (2004–present) and former member of the First Presidency (2008–2018).
• Elder Quinten L. Cook, member of the Quorum of the Twelve (2007–present).
• Elder LeGrand R. Curtis Jr., general authority Seventy (2011–present), Church Historian and Recorder, and the Executive Director of the Church History Department (2019–present).

To this list I would add Elder B.H. Roberts, member of the First Council of the Seventy (1888–1933) and Assistant Church Historian (1902–1933), as well as numerous Church publications in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Jonathan Neville envisions a grand conspiracy of scholars and Church employees who are trying to undermine “the teachings of the prophets.” The only way his narrative can work, however, is if he completely ignores the inconvenient fact that living prophets and apostles are teaching the very things he claims are false and harmful to the Church.

“Know assuredly that that man is in the high road to apostacy.”

—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.