The irrelevance of Jonathan Neville’s ideas

This blog has been rather quiescent lately. That’s partly because I’ve been dealing with some health problems in my immediately family and partly because Jonathan Neville’s recent blog posts have been more of the same monotonous assertions.

As I’ve noted before, Neville continually repeats the same talking points. I estimate that he’s posted around 1,390 blog entries (139 pages × 10 posts per page), but the amount of actual content in all those posts can be summarized in three short bullet points:

1. The hill Cumorah of the Book of Mormon was in western New York, not Mesoamerica (“M2C”).
2. Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon with the Urim and Thummim (meaning the Nephite interpreters); he did not use a seer stone to translate (“SITH”).
3. There is a massive conspiracy among Church scholars, Church historians, Church employees, and even among general authorities to suppress the knowledge of points 1 and 2—what Neville calls “the teachings of the prophets”—among the general membership of the Church.

What do his claims teach us about the Book of Mormon that help us understand and apply its teachings better? Nothing. Heartland dogma adds nothing of any value to Book of Mormon studies. It’s merely a convenient way for Heartlanders to make money and/or to accumulate followers who recognize their supposed expertise. Like other pseudoscientific ventures Neville has been involved in, the Heartland movement is “strong on entrepreneurial initiative but lacking in…scientific credentials” and verifiable results.

Meanwhile, Neville continues to insist that “discussions of Book of Mormon historicity/geography and the manner of translation should never rise to the level of contention or disputation,” while, in the very same blog post, he levels contentious accusations at his opponents, such as, “They don’t trust Latter-day Saints to make informed decisions. Instead, they tell them what to think. They censor information that contradicts M2C and SITH. They tell them the prophets were wrong, etc.” This complete and utter lack of self awareness suggests to me that he has an obsessive–compulsive disorder that exceeds even than my own in its depth and intensity.

Neville insists that the “M2C citation cartel”—which he claims consists of Book of Mormon Central, the Interpreter Foundation, Meridian Magazine, FAIR, and (at least “until recently”) BYU Studies Quarterly—“all know they have been promoting M2C while censoring and attacking alternative faithful interpretations of the Book of Mormon.” He further asserts:

They know the truth can tarnish their brands. Imagine having taught and promoted M2C for decades and then having to confess that you had deliberately suppressed the truth about what the prophets had taught about the New York Cumorah? Their brand—their self-appointed expertise about the Book of Mormon—would be tarnished for a long, long time.”

I hate to break it to Neville, but the individuals behind these organizations—and I know some of them personally—“know” nothing of the sort. They spend virtually no time thinking about—let along worrying about—the claims of Heartlanders. Occasionally an organization like the Interpreter Foundation or FAIR will address the shoddy scholarship and mistaken assertions of Heartlanders, but for the most part they simply aren’t concerned about the eccentric claims made by Jonathan Neville, Rod Meldrum, and others in the Heartland movement.

Nearly every one of Neville’s 1,390 blog posts has been obsessed with criticizing “M2C” and its scholars. These scholars, on the other hand, simply don’t care what Jonathan Neville thinks.

As Elder Bruce R. McConkie once famously said, “What does it matter if a few barking dogs snap at the heels of the weary travelers? Or that predators claim those few who fall by the way? The caravan moves on.”

—Peter Pan