Keywords
atheist piety, Joseph Smith, religious community
Abstract
The “Special Feature” of this mass-market secular humanist magazine consists of an introduction to “America’s Peculiar Piety” followed by a miscellany of brief, nonscholarly essays critical of The Church of Jesus Christ. The questions posed in the introduction to this flagship atheist magazine go unad dressed in the essays. Some of the essays are personal exit stories by former Latter-day Saints. One is an effort by Robert M. Price to explain away the Book of Mormon without confronting its contents. This is done by ignoring the details of Joseph Smith’s career in order to picture him as the equivalent of a bizarre, emotionally conflicted figure like Charles Manson or as the embodiment of one of a wide range of mythical trickster figures like Brer Rabbit, Felix the Cat, or Doctor Who. The assumed link between these mythical or legendary figures and Joseph Smith is said to be a Jungian archetype lodged in his presumably de ranged psyche, leading him to fashion the Book of Mormon.
Recommended Citation
Midgley, Louis C.
(2012)
"Atheist Piety: A Religion of Dogmatic Dubiety,"
Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship: Vol. 1, Article 9.
Available at:
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/interpreter/vol1/iss1/9
