From: jwindley@asylum.cs.utah.edu (Jay Windley)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Walter Martin (was: Help For Jehovah's Witnesses)
Date: 6 Jan 93 07:22:01 GMT
Organization: University of Utah CS Dept

In article <Jan.3.21.43.51.1993.28256@geneva.rutgers.edu>
 vek@allegra.att.com (Van Kelly) writes:

>But I also recognize some of what bothers many readers of _Kingdom of
>the Cults_.  For one thing, grouping such diverse groups together
>under a single "cult" label is not quite fair to the diversity of the
>groups he covers.

Nor is it fair to their legitimacy.  "Cult" is a word with negative
connotations in modern religion.  I don't want to delve into shades of
meaning here since it happens enough already, but none of the groups
Martin discusses fits my intuitive understanding of what a "cult" is.
His title seems sensationalistic and its implications are far from
fair.

Fine.  The literature of religion is seldom objective and even more
seldom fair.  But a religious author like Martin -- especially one of
his stature -- should have asked himself if he were contributing to a
solution or to a problem.

Of foremost importance in a study of diversity is the commitment to
avoid being judgemental.  One can disagree with a viewpoint without
offending its adherents.  Walter Martin did not do this.  His title
bears this out.

>Second, he feels free to
>select the quotations and interpretations that define the theological
>bent of each "cult".

This is especially acute in Martin's treatment of Mormons.  Nearly all
the evidence for his conclusions comes from journals which were never
intended nor accepted as sources of belief.  In fact, they have been
characterized since their publication as speculative and not
representative of Mormon teachings.  Yet Martin based his conclusions
on this material.

Whether the distortion was intentional or not is irrelevant from the
point of view of many whom Martin has criticized.  Scholarly
irresponsibility is not as bad as malice, but it is still bad.  He has
given people a bad image which is not deserved.

Mormons and other minority believers spend their whole lives dealing
with or attempting to correct this bad image.  They tell people "No,
we're really not like that."  Then along come respected authors like
Walter Martin who reinforce the negative images with selective quoting
and copious footnotes.  And of course they're telling people -- for
the most part -- what they already knew or wanted to hear and are
doing it in a scholarly context, so why shouldn't they be believed?

>I think that members of non-mainstream groups have a point when they
>claim that Martin misses their whole "gestalt".  His chapters on JW's,
>LDS, etc. don't accurately convey what it is like to *be* a JW or an
>LDS, not even one little bit.  Fair enough, but that wasn't what his
>book was about.  Martin was initially responding to what he personally
>considered to be deception and revisionism in the *proselytizing
>tactics* of some heterodox fringe groups.

One can hardly expect every book written on a religion to accurately
convey the experience of belonging to the religion.  But one has to
ask certain questions of any such work.

Has the author accurately represented to the reader the historical and
idealogical context of the evidence he cites?  Martin didn't.  He
provided his own context -- one which supports his conclusions.

Are the author's conclusions consistent with those of others who have
seen the same evidence?  If not, how is the difference justified?  And
more importantly: if others have made the same conclusion, how does
the author deal with the existing rebuttals?  Martin made left-field
conclusions on shaky evidence.

One cannot categorically deny that Mormons, Witnesses, and other such
minorities are not guilty of revisionism.  But should the answer to
these revisions come in the form of more deception?

>Many people, myself
>included, think his brush was a bit too broad and his research slipped
>in spots, but I don't see the "nastiness" in his writings that some
>do, nor am I prepared to write him off entirely.

The "nastiness" I see is not in particular passages of his writings,
but in the tenor of how he chose to approach his subject.  It appears
to me that somewhere along the line he lost his original vision and
wanted his conclusions to sound more valid that they really were.
It's not so much that his research slipped "in spots," but that it was
designed to support a conclusion he'd already made.
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         Jay Windley  *  University of Utah  *  Salt Lake City
                    jwindley@asylum.cs.utah.edu
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