Talk:Book of Mormon

NPOV tag

I've placed an {npov} tag because this article does not clearly present the mainstream view of the Book of Mormon, beginning with what it is and who wrote it. It should say that the Book of Mormon was written by Joseph Smith in the early 19th century. Instead, that fact is quite buried, in the line In the twenty-first century, leading naturalistic interpretations of Book of Mormon origins hold that Smith authored it himself, whether consciously or subconsciously, and simultaneously sincerely believed the Book of Mormon was an authentic sacred history. Even that sentence is inappropriately qualified ... "leading naturalistic interpretations" is the mainstream view, also known as "the truth." "Joseph Smith authored the Book of Mormon" should be in the lead, and it should be the first view given in the "Origins" section. Before I go about rewriting it, does anybody disagree with this? Levivich (talk) 17:38, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

• Agreed. Switched the order of the lede's first two sentences. starship.paint (RUN) 13:16, 13 March 2024 (UTC)
• Agreed, NPOV is non-negotiable and we should not be presenting fringe views as superior to or the equal of normal ones. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:06, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

  When you categorize a religious belief held by millions of people as "fringe", and your own beliefs as "normal", I would argue that you are not on NPOV ground. Any belief held by millions of people is notable enough for an encyclopedia, even if it is not factual.

  But I honestly think this article's bigger problem is that it spends far too many words on the question of historicity, especially in the introduction. Contrast, for example, the article on the Torah, another religious text that most scholars do not regard as a historically accurate document, but which many Jews and Christians regard as historical anyway. The Torah article spends virtually no time debating evidence for or against its historical correctness! Instead, its sections are primarily focused on the themes, symbolism, and religious significance of the book.

  Right now, most of the Book of Mormon article's introduction, as well as two major sections ("Origins" and "Views on Historical Authenticity") focus heavily on historicity. That seems excessive to me. I think one section and 2-3 sentences in the introduction would be sufficient. The more space we spend on the historicity issues debate, the greater the temptation for people to insert non-NPOV language.

  TLDR: Religion is not fringe, but I agree this article has problems, and I might have used a Debate or Review cleanup tag instead of NPOV. Statesman 88 (talk) 22:20, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

  Fringe doesn't mean people don't believe it, it means that qualified experts don't believe it. Something can be believed by the majority of people on the planet and still be fringe as wikipedia considers it (take for instance LGBTQ medical issues where the medical consensus is at odds with most of the world's opinions). Not everything religious is fringe, but much that is fringe is religious. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 06:51, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

• Yeah. TrangaBellam (talk) 18:09, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

  Yeah [you're right]., Yeah [I disagree with this]., or Yeah [though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me].? Levivich (talk) 18:24, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

• Agreed on the need for NPOV tag, and on Starship.paint's sentence switch. However I'm struggling to see how "it is patently obvious..." can be considered NPOV, it's a mocking tone rather than "nonjudgmental" and "impartial". It's also inaccurate: if it was "patently obvious that Smith had authored the Book by himself" then neither the plagiarism hypotheses nor the rumours about Smith having help from a third party would ever have gained traction. Pastychomper (talk) 15:20, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

  I agree. I just switched out "patently obvious" for "more widely accepted view", aiming for NPOV. I hope people like that language, but I'm open to continued revision. Statesman 88 (talk) 22:23, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

It looks like someone spent a lot of time scrubbing this article of anything that wasn’t LDS approved. :( 2600:1700:F90:6950:ACF9:19B6:8CC1:724B (talk) 01:35, 5 April 2024 (UTC)

I'd like to move we remove this POV tag now. All the directly POV phrasing has been scrubbed that I can see. Also, I've spent some time breaking out the subsections on Historicity and hopefully making it crystal clear what the mainstream consensus is. Also by increasing its length and relative prominence, that should help with issues of imbalance. That said, since this is an article about a fundamentally religious topic, I think it's perfectly appropriate (and NPOV) for other sections to have a more religious bent, discussing religious significance, content, etc. Trevdna (talk) 21:34, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

I placed the NPOV tag but have not had a chance to review the article lately, though I am aware that there's been a lot of editing to fix the NPOV concerns. So if other editors who have reviewed the article think the NPOV concerns have been taken care of and the tag is no longer necessary then there's no objection to removing it from me. If I see issues in the future I'm happy to bring them up again, in the meantime I don't want to hold anything up due to my lack of time. Levivich (talk) 22:53, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

I would support removing the tag, though I grant I'm also someone who contributed to some of the recent revision (not as much as Trevdna; I just found an academic source for the sentence about there being no samples of reformed Egyptian). I think Trevdna did a good job with the views on historicity section. I remember overhauling the section a couple years ago after an editor tried to add a bunch of citations to apologetics. That entailed changing what was a bullet pointed list of anachronisms into body text paragraphs summarizing the mainstream assessment, adding the Isaiah intertext matter, etc. Trevdna meanwhile has taken the section across a finish line by taking the long paragraphs I left and organizing them into more legible subsections. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 06:34, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

I'll remove it for now, but @Levivich, if upon further review you believe your concerns have not been fully addressed, feel free to put it back and let us know why. Thanks all. Trevdna (talk) 16:30, 3 May 2024 (UTC)

Weird sentence removed

"The book is also a critique of Western society, condemning immorality, individualism, social inequality, ethnic injustice, nationalism, and the rejection of God, revelation, and miraculous religion."

I don't see a clear explanation that everyone agrees this claim is true. How does it critique "Western society"? How does it condemn "immorality", "social inequality", "ethnic injustice", and "nationalism" (and how does it define these)? Where is "atheism" mentioned in the Book of Mormon? In short, this sentence is just a Mormon POV. A reading of the book does not lead to these conclusions unless you're in the cult, I suspect. jps (talk) 14:45, 25 June 2024 (UTC)

Strike your last sentence, which violates the BLP policy in the way it describes Nathan O. Hatch, Jonathan Sudholt, Charles L. Cohen, and Richard Bushman—the scholars whose work to which that content, summarized in the lead, is cited to in the body—and all living persons.

If you read the article, you will notice that that sentence of the lead summarizes Book_of_Mormon#Critique_of_the_United_States, cited to content published in journals (including The American Historical Review The Journal of American History), a university press book (from Yale University Press), and a book published by a respected mainstream publisher (Alfred A. Knopf). Only Bushman is a Latter-day Saint, and he's also Gouverneur Morris Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University, and unless you have evidence he (along with Hatch, Sudholt, and Cohen) has hoodwinked Columbia University, Alfred A. Knopf, and The American Historical Review The Journal of American History, saying that these readings are impossible for someone who isn't a 'cultist' constitutes unsourced contentious material about living persons.

You should also revert your last edit to Book of Mormon, as you are violating WP:NPOV by substituting your personal interpretation of the topic over and against academic sources.

Finally, your edit summary—accusing me of writing an Unintelligible edit summary—is a personal attack. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 18:16, 25 June 2024 (UTC)

This is all personalizing and is very silly. Stop being silly. There is a simple point which is the Book of Mormon is not inarguably "a critique of Western society, condemning immorality, individualism, social inequality, ethnic injustice, nationalism, and the rejection of God, revelation, and miraculous religion." Some people may think that is what it is doing, but Wikipedia should not be WP:ASSERTing that is what it is doing when, in fact, it is just 19th century religious fan fiction. jps (talk) 01:39, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

Stop being silly: Policy recommends telling letting another editor know how their edit made you feel, so I will let you know that your decision to diminish my concerns about policy and guideline breaches, and to accuse me of being the one personalizing things when you have called my contribution "unintelligble", makes me feel hurt and diminished. I invite you to be more civil.

I also invite you to consider that your personal interpretation of the Book of Mormon may well vary from the way religious studies scholars, historians, and other trained academics in the humanities assess it and its context. Calling the Book of Mormon fan fiction is a popular joke about it, but Wikipedia favors the WP:BESTSOURCES for topics, particularly academic sources. When historian Nathan O. Hatch, in The Democratization of American Christianity (called by Gordon S. Wood "the best book on religion in the early Republic that has ever been written"), calls the Book of Mormon "a document of profound social protest" (116) against American society, that is a much more reliable and consensus assessment than descriptions of the topic circulated in Reddit threads and social media posts. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 03:38, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

You haven't responded to the substance of my complaint still. jps (talk) 15:26, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

I have; see the paragraph starting I also invite you to consider, which addresses the substance of your complaint by pointing out that the sentence you call weird summarizes assessments from academic sources. Meanwhile, you haven't responded to my concerns about incivility and contentious content about living persons in comments you have posted other than dismissing them as silly. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 17:36, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

My complaint was not over whether the sentence "summarized assessments". Try again. jps (talk) 18:01, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

How do we get from a social protest against American society (what is apparently in the source) to a critique of Western society (what was written in the article)? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:38, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

That's helpful to point out. The expansion from American society to Western society may have been prompted by "What's New in Mormon History" (cited in Book of Mormon), an article from The Journal of American History (vol. 94, no. 2, September 2007), which states the Book of Mormon was thundering no to the state of the world in Joseph Smith's time and that it condemned social inequalities, moral abominations, rejection of revelations and miracles, disrespect for Israel (including the Jews), subjection of the Indians, and the abuse of the continent by interloping European migrants . However, while this may imply "Western society", it's probably simpler, more focused on the topic's immediate context, and more consensus (matching Nathan O. Hatch's assessment of the book as well) to summarize it as having been at the time of publication a critique of simply American society. Thanks for pointing this out, Horse Eye's Back. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 17:49, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

Given the context of that particular article it should likely be attributed to Bushman, the full name is "What's New in Mormon History: A Response to Jan Shipps" and is a response to a review of his book Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling in that same journal by Shipps[1]. I don't have access to that source on this device, can you pull larger quotes for some more context? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 18:03, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

I don't think the idea that the Book of Mormon is "critiquing" anything is all that important a point. Others don't seem too taken with such points. Why are we letting our own article become so obsessed with this kind of inside baseball minutiae? jps (talk) 18:06, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

Who are these 'others'? There seem to be you and an IP (174.212.225.61). Meanwhile, User:ChristensenMJ restored the sentence, as did I. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 18:11, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

I'm referring to sources that discuss the ontology of the Book of Mormon. Few seem to categorize it as a "critique" of anything. Most classify it either as a religious treatise or a "forgery" in a more old-fashioned sense of the term. jps (talk) 18:15, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

You seem to imply these genres are somehow mutually exclusive. A religious treatise that depicts an invented history of Indigenous America can also criticize the society in which it's published. Several academic sources call the book a critique:

• Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (Yale University Press, 1989): The Book of Mormon is a document of profound social protest, an impassioned manifesto by a hostile outsider against the smug complacency of those in power and the reality of social distinctions based on wealth, class, and education. In attempting to define his alienation from the world around him, Smith attempted resorted to a biblical frame of reference (page 116)
• Richard Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling: Joseph Smith (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005): The book sacralized the land but condemned the people. The Indians were the chosen ones, not the European interlopers. The Book of Mormon was the seminal text, not the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. The gathering of lost Israel, not the establishment of liberty, was the great work. In the Book of Mormon, the biblical overwhelms the national. Taken as a whole, the Book of Mormon can be read as a "document of profound social protest" against the dominant culture of Joseph Smith's time.
• Richard Bushman, "What's New in Mormon History? A Response to Jan Shipps", Journal of American History 94, no. 2 (September 2007): the Book of Mormon appears as a deep critique of American culture, including its religious culture (page 520)
• Elizabeth Fenton, "Open Canons: Sacred History and American History in The Book of Mormon", J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-century Americanists 1, no. 2 (Fall 2013): The Book of Mormon offers a radical revision of American history that presents both documania and the Puritan errand as dead ends. and it establishes a narrative precedent for the critique of US Protestantism that would come to form the backbone of early Mormonism (page 349)
• Jared Hickman, "The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse", American Literature 86, no. 3 (2014): A vicious circle developed: antebellum American readers predisposed by their sociocultural location to racism were authorized under the reigning hermeneutic to read that racism into a text that had been elevated to the status of literal word of God [the Bible] , thereby making their racism appear to originate from a source not only other but higher than themselves. White domination acquired the sheen of incontestable divine decree. The Book of Mormon severs this vicious circle by simultaneously negating the authority deposited by literalist hermeneuts in "the Bible alone" and diametrically opposing another vision of racial apocalypse.
• Jonathan Sudholt, "Unreadability is the Reader’s Problem: The Book of Mormon’s Critique of the Antebellum US Public Sphere", Radical Americas 2 (2017): the text’s cultural critique, a critique that is so intense that The Book of Mormon stages the annihilation of America not once, but twice, before its fury is used up. and The Book of Mormon, published in a nation that prided itself on a guarantee of free speech that would allow dissent, presents a nation that absolutely refuses to entertain the slightest dissent. It gives the impression that what this allowance for dissent is all about is to deny people any grounds on which they might dissent, for what country could be less deserving of criticism than that in which one is allowed to point out its failures, its hypocrisies, and its contradictions? Thus, it is designed not so much to be the land of freedom and equality it says it is, as to preempt the very criticism it claims to embrace. So, at least, Smith suggests.

Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 18:56, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

You completely missed my point. None of these sources identify the genre as "critique" in the main. jps (talk) 12:34, 28 June 2024 (UTC)

To the extent you think I missed your point, you may be missing mine. The article doesn't categorize the topic's genre in, say, an infobox as 'critique'; it uses the religious text infobox. The aspects of the topic that are a critique are summarized in a subsection of the historical context section (and previously summarized fairly far down in the lead, which is meant to summarize the article), as the book's interaction with the culture around it is part of how relevant scholarship historically contextualizes the topic. My point is that the topic's main genre being a religious treatise doesn't mean it can't also be historical contextualized as expressing a critique of the society in which it's published. (For instance, as Hatch expresses, the criticism of the United States is core to the book's religious message.) Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 15:27, 28 June 2024 (UTC)

Hatch does not say that criticism of the United States is core to the book's religious message. This is the problem with your approach. You are impugning importance to simple observation. The Book of Mormon is not at its core a protest. jps (talk) 15:44, 28 June 2024 (UTC)

We somehow have pretty different impressions of Hatch (1989). The monograph seems clear about how important the theme is to the topic of the Book of Mormon. In addition to the quotation cited further up in the thread:

• This "Gospel" was a radically reconstituted history of the New World, a drama indicting America's churches as lifeless shells, blind and deaf to the real meaning of their own history and to the divine intent for the latter days (115)
• The single most striking theme of the Book of Mormon is that it is the rich, the proud, and the learned who find themselves in the hands of an angry God (117)
• The interlocking themes of pride, wealth, learning, fine clothing, and oppression of the poor reappear throughout the Book of Mormon (119)
• The vision of Joseph Smith [as expressed in the Book of Mormon, as is clear in the context of this paragraph coming on the heels of four pages about the book and the rest of the page continuing in that vein] is intensely populist in its rejection of the religious conventions of his day and in its hostility to the orthodox clergy (120)

If I may suggest a possible problem with your approach: you seem to have personal conclusions about the topic and what the article should say about it (e. g. in fact, it is just 19th century religious fan fiction), rather than letting the article's content be guided by the best sources, including academic scholarship. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 20:16, 28 June 2024 (UTC)

@Horse Eye's Back:: Here is a longer quotation from "What's New in Mormon History":

Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling was slated for publication by Alfred A. Knopf. I was much more aware of writing for a general audience, so the intramural debates between apologists and critics of Mormonism seemed less relevant. General readers, I thought, would want to get a taste of these controversies but not to become mired in them. They would be more interested, I presumed, in what the Book of Mormon meant to Joseph Smith and to his readers than in the apologists’ attempts to defend the book. My aim was to situate the book in its American environment—not to identify its sources, but to explain its interaction with American culture. In this more recent version, the Book of Mormon appears as a deep critique of American culture, including its religious culture. (520) Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 19:30, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

I do not think these instances identify the genre of the Book of Mormon as one of "critique". To be sure, I am confident that there is a reading of almost any popular text you care to name that identifies it as critiquing something or other, but our job as an encyclopedia should not be to identify every popular text as a critique which would be the logical conclusion of the practice we are talking about here. jps (talk) 19:35, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

Our job as an encyclopedia is to summarize what reliable secondary sources (with WP:SCHOLARSHIP being the gold standard) say about a text. If relevant scholarship identifies a text's critical aspects as meaningful and relevant, then that's part of the findings we summarize. If relevant secondary sources don't do that, then we don't summarize it. In this case, they do. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 19:45, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

You have not demonstrated that a primary means of identifying the Book of Mormon is as a critique or in that kind of genre. Novel readings by prominent scholars can be discussed, but it should not be forced into Wikipedia's voice per WP:ASSERT. jps (talk) 15:37, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

I disagree that this is merely a Novel reading; it's a reading that's been affirmed and reaffirmed by relevant scholarship for more than three decades. And I disagree that its relevance for describing the topic in its historical context hasn't been demonstrated. Multiple high-quality sources, including two monographs considered authoritative, have been cited. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 18:30, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

Since there are no reviews of the literature that I have seen which deal with the question, it is a matter of original research to declare whether the view has been systematically "affirmed and reaffirmed" or not. As it is, I see almost nothing to indicate that this is a major lens by which the book is studied. It seems a view that is held by a small group. jps (talk) 19:16, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

Ok so in context its more a statement about the Book of Mormon in Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling than the Book of Mormon in general. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:38, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

I'm struggling to see that reading. "What's New" is not saying that Rough Stone Rolling is a critique of the United States, but that the Book of Mormon is. It does also address that that's the assessment of Bushman settled on when he wrote Rough Stone Rolling, but I don't think that makes it so nothing in the claim is about the Book of Mormon itself. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 19:47, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

"What's New" is saying that in Rough Stone Rolling The Book of Mormon appears as a critique of the United States. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:55, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

Nomination for worst sentence

"Meanwhile, some Americans thought antebellum disestablishment and denominational proliferation undermined religious authority through ubiquity, producing sectarian confusion that only obfuscated the path to spiritual security."

You've got to be kidding me. Anyone think this is a reasonable sentence?

jps (talk) 01:44, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

What is unreasonable about the sentence? It is meant to summarize Charles L. Cohen's description of the Antebellum religious context of Joseph Smith. From his article: states cast off their establishments (except in Puritanism's ancient bastions), revivals fired up, and preachers—whether belonging to a denomination or proclaiming their own singular gospels—proliferated. This homiletic hubbub was good news if you were Thomas Jefferson, for it evinced the flourishing of religious liberty based on the rights of individuals to worship as their conscidneces alone dictated, but bad news if you were a young man sifting the ashes of a burned-over district for the gold of absolute truth resulting in a situation that opened a spiritual abyss under someone who would take the welter of contesting doctrines as evidence not that all churches offered a version of the gospel, but that they afforded none at all. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 03:26, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

I think if a person already knows all those words, then it's sensible and accurate, but it's not fun to read. I don't think it's a great sentence for an encyclopedia that's trying to be inclusive of all readers, including ones that come to English from other languages. A more accessible sentence, something like "Meanwhile, the rapidly growing number of religious denominations and sects in the young nation seemed to offer too many religious choices, leaving some Americans with the impression that no legitimate path to salvation existed at all", might be more appropriate. Indignant Flamingo (talk) 07:11, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

@Indignant Flamingo I think that's a fine edit and would support it as a replacement. jps (talk) 15:25, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

Yup. Long words bad. Short words good. AndyTheGrump (talk)

A thank you to Indignant Flamingo for this constructive, civil, and collaborative approach to improving the page. I agree that the revision simplifies and improves the language. Since multiple editors support it, I've replaced the sentence with Indignant Flamingo's revision. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 17:40, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

Overreliance on Bushman

Hey, I get it. There is this approach going around in the Book of Mormon obsessed world that tries to read a lot of context into the work. That's cool and interesting, but we aren't here to go out on limbs. So I removed a paragraph that is cited almost entirely to one interesting but parochial source (and the text is not properly attributed to the authors though it should have been). [2]

Predictably, it was reinserted for... less than edifying reasons, AFAIC.

jps (talk) 18:05, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

What is parochial about content published in The Journal of American History and by Alfred A. Knopf? Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 18:08, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

How many citations does this work have? What is its impact factor? jps (talk) 18:10, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

A GoogleScholar search indicates the Knopf-published book, Rough Stone Rolling, has been cited 787 times. At the January 2011 annual meeting of the American Historical Association, Laurie Maffly-Kipp (the Archer Alexander Distinguished Professor at Washington University in St. Louis), called the book clearly the work of a judicious and seasoned scholar who has a thorough command of his sources and an encyclopedic knowledge of his subject. I can’t begin to count the number of times in the last five years that I have returned to consult Rough Stone Rolling as the definitive account. (text of her full AHA remarks printed pages 29–36, quotation here is 29, of Dialogue vol. 44, no. 3 [Fall 2011]).

As for "What's New in Mormon History", GoogleScholar indicates 21 citations. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 18:19, 26 June 2024 (UTC) Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 18:19, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

I'm not too thrilled with the walled garden nature of those citations (and, let's be honest, none of the first 20 references to the book was talking about the content of this paragraph). Impact factor is pretty low from what I'm seeing. Doesn't look like it deserves this kind of emphasis. jps (talk) 18:21, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

What is the "walled garden" you refer to? Do you mean to consider the American Historical Association a walled garden? Or Harvard University Press, Palgrave Macmillan, Columbia University Press, and Princeton University Press, the publishers of the four first results I see? (I'm not 100% sure if we'll see identical results or if they're somehow tailored algorithmically}

I'll add that Jan Shipps's review in The Journal of American History (September 2007) called Rough Stone Rolling's treatment of the topic a brilliant explication of the Book of Mormon, which challenges Terryl Givens' study of the Mormon scripture as the best currently in print.

Are there sources about and assessments of the topic with superior impact factors that establish your interpretations, stated on this page, as academically consensus? When I searched "Book of Mormon" AND "fanfiction", the first hit was a Reddit thread. On GoogleScholar, the hits were studies of fanfiction about conventional media written by Mormons. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 18:36, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

I mean there seems to be strong citogenesis to these ideas among a small group. Some of that is inevitable when dealing with a niche field, but it can cause weird obsessions in the literature to form that do not necessarily reflect a "general understanding". And there isn't a strong case being made here this paragraph represents a fair appraisal of what the general understanding of BoM is supposed to be. jps (talk) 19:41, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

My impression is that Wikipedia by design is biased in favor of academic understandings of topics. We want to summarize a general understanding of the topic in the relevant scholarship, which isn't necessarily the same as what the hypothetical average opinion across humanity would be. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 19:53, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia by design is WP:NPOV which sometimes is academic understanding, but unless there is a clear exposition of what that "academic understanding" is, we are not equipped to declare what it is. In the case of literary investigations of sacred texts, Wikipedia is not supposed to adopt, uncritically, every novel argument found in the academic literature. jps (talk) 15:38, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

Considering this merely one among many novel argument[s] in literature about the topic seems to disregard that it's an assessment that's been affirmed and reaffirmed in relevant scholarship for more than three decades. You use the term citogenesis—a phrase I'm more accustomed to seeing used when Wikipedia circularly cites itself via another source—but what's going on seems more like WP:USEBYOTHERS.

As for understanding what an academic understanding is, guidelines indicate that academic understandings of a topic are found in academic secondary sources: works written by professional historians with university postings, and/or published by university presses and peer-reviewed journals. These are the kinds of sources to which the content is cited. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 18:30, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

What you are describing as secondary sources are actually primary sources inasmuch as they are offering novel arguments. Find a source which talks about the ubiquity or lack thereof. Then you'll have a secondary source for our purposes. jps (talk) 19:17, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

You seem to be invoking an understanding of primary sources that applies to hard sciences, in which academic journals publish raw data generated by experimentation. Such articles report on and primary experimental data and so they're primary sources, so for topics in hard sciences—especially those that fall under WP:MEDRS—review essays are appropriately expected.

In humanities disciplines like history and religious studies, however, primary sources are the corpus of texts that provide data: archival collections, historical newspapers, diaries and journals, etc. Secondary sources which interpret those primary sources are published as monographs but also as journal articles, as these fields' journals don't generally publish experimental data (experimentation being not really a thing history can do—the past is past).

An academically published explanation and verification of this can be found on pages 59–60 of Eugene V. Gallagher and Joanne Maguire, The Religious Studies Skills Book: Close Reading, Critical Thinking, and Comparison (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019). For the sake of accessibility, there's also an adequate explanation in Amy Guptill, Writing in College: From Competence to Excellence (Open SUNY Textbooks, 2016). Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 03:30, 28 June 2024 (UTC)

If you think my take on what a primary source versus a secondary source is problematic, maybe you should open a query at WP:RSN or start a WP:RfC. I am pretty sure I'm not out on a limb here. jps (talk) 02:17, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

I'm sorry to hear you think a noticeboard is necessary and that we can't resolve this by discussion on this talk page, but on your suggestion, I've started a thread at RSN. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 00:12, 2 July 2024 (UTC)

I agree that we have an overreliance on Bushman... And the walled garden in general as it were. But I think we should be looking more broadly at the sourcing, for example we probably shouldn't be using BYU Studies Quarterly in this context and I'm not sure what use Sudholt is to us either as it seems to be pretty out there in the opposite direction from the walled garden "This article reads The Book of Mormon as an attack on the incoherence of American nationalism – as, specifically, a book about the inevitability of its own irrelevance." and is unless I'm missing something more thought expiriment than historical exercise. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 18:53, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

I've revised the Historical context section such that it no longer cites the BYUSQ source, though I'm struggling to see what was so at issue with it. It wasn't even written by a Latter-day Saint. Was there something unacceptable about the claim it was cited for, that the rapidly growing number of religious denominations and sects in the young nation seemed to offer too many religious choices, leaving some Americans with the impression that no legitimate path to salvation existed at all? Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 19:21, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

BYU Studies Quarterly is only marginally reliable, editorially they take an apologist line (they are after all "Scholarship Aligned with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.") As for the text itself I don't think its actually an excellent summary of the souce... But thats not really my bag with it. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:31, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

There is this approach going around in the Book of Mormon obsessed world that tries to read a lot of context into the work.: By way of clarity, OP writes "Book of Mormon obsessed world". From what I can tell, the claims to which he objects are ones cited to sources published by journals or presses in the secular academic fields of religious studies, history, and the humanities. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 19:24, 26 June 2024 (UTC)