“Answering one of the silliest arguments against the Book of Mormon Ever”

Last updated on: July 26, 2016 at 12:01 pm by Dan Peterson

“Answering one of the silliest arguments against the Book of Mormon Ever” 2016-07-26T12:01:14-06:00 Dan Peterson

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St. Saviour’s Church, Dublin
(Wikimeda CC photo by Andreas F. Borchert)

In my experience, theistic anti-Mormonism is largely (though not entirely) a conservative Protestant or evangelical enterprise. (Secularist anti-Mormonism is increasingly visible and influential, but it’s another story completely.)

Although there is some Catholic anti-Mormon activity — heck, I’ve even seen a Muslim anti-Mormon pamphlet — Protestants are, by and large, the folks who set up “ministries,” publish newsletters, broadcast radio shows, travel on the lecture circuit, churn out pamphlets, teach divinity school classes, produce videos, hold public seminars, offer online courses, organize picket lines, air television shows, sponsor “mission trips,” author books, and run a myriad of websites aimed at criticizing Mormonism, and who, in a comparatively small but surprising number of cases, earn their livings by attacking the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Thus, it’s not unexpected, given all their undertakings, that fundamentalist and evangelical Protestants have come up with most of the stupidest arguments against Mormon beliefs. (At some point, I’ll probably share an example or two of what I mean.)

Although the Muslim pamphlet that I once saw was fairly unimpressive, it at least attempted to mount a sober argument, and the few Catholic criticisms that I’ve seen have always been at least a cut above many evangelical attacks. Sometimes, in fact, they’ve even been fairly interesting.

But our Irish friend Robert Boylan, who might understandably be more attentive to Catholic criticisms of Mormonism because of his location near Dublin, has located what surely has to rank as one of the most obviously laughable anti-Mormon arguments that I’ve ever seen, and it’s from a Catholic:

http://scripturalmormonism.blogspot.com/2016/07/answering-one-of-silliest-arguments.html

I’m grateful to him for pointing it out. I’ve kept something of a mental list of such particularly ridiculous arguments since the day on my mission in Switzerland when, in a small bookstore in the Berner Oberland, I ran across the claim of a nineteenth century woman to have escaped from white slavery in a Mormon harem by leaping from a western window of the Salt Lake Temple into the Great Salt Lake and swimming to freedom. I had heard about such stories, but had always assumed that they were joking exaggerations. However, there it was . . . in a serious book — well, from its looks and its tone, it was intended to be taken seriously — designed to rebut the claims of Mormonism and to cast doubt on the integrity of Mormons. (I regret that I no longer remember the woman’s name. Presumably, she went on to set all sorts of track and field records; anybody capable of a standing broad jump of at least twenty miles, even if she did have the advantage of leaping from an upper window, would have been — to put it mildly — an athlete to reckon with.)

Incidentally, the Cowdrey, Davis, and Scales book to which Brother Boylan refers was pretty funny even back when it was published in 1977, both because it was very bad and because Wayne Cowdrey was claiming to be a descendent of Oliver Cowdery. (He explained the difference in the spellings of their names — Cowdrey versus Cowdery — as a merely family variant that was without significance.) Alas, though, Oliver Cowdery had only one child, a daughter. Had she married, she would almost certainly have taken the name of her husband, which presumably would have been neither Cowdery nor Cowdrey. But she died unmarried, and she never had children. Which is to say that, if Wayne Cowdery was a descendent of Oliver Cowdery, it must have been through some absolutely unaccountable miracle.

And this was absolutely fitting, because the Cowdrey, Davis, and Scales book was pushed and publicized by the late “Dr.” Walter R. Martin, a then-famous evangelical Protestant countercult impresario who had built up a very large ministry (headquartered only a relatively short drive from where I’m writing) based not only on his own charisma but, among other things, on his possession of a bogus doctorate and on a demonstrably false claim of direct descent from Brigham Young.

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