Such paranoia is a good example of how members (and employees) of a citation cartel think and operate. The credentialed class all too often take personal offense to differences of opinion, resort to academic bullying, and employ censorship to protect their intellectual cartels.

I personally like every LDS scholar I’ve met, regardless of any disagreements I have with them over specific issues. They’re all great people. I don’t take such disagreements personally and I’m always eager to change my mind when presented with better, more complete facts and logical arguments.

Furthermore, I respect everyone who engages in discussions about LDS issues, regardless of their point of view or agenda.

My objection to the M2C citation cartel is based on their ongoing censorship of alternative ideas, perspectives, and approaches to the issues. Their censorship represents an intellectual elitism that I consider indefensible and counterproductive, but it is hardly unique to M2C (see below). And, more importantly, that doesn’t mean the members of the cartel are not smart, faithful, thoughtful, and awesome people. 
_____

For branding, M2C is important to help readers know the editorial bias of a particular publication or article.

No one who reads BYU Studies, for example, should be unaware of the editors’ bias in favor of M2C. Only readers who understand the M2C bias can make a fair assessment of the credibility and reliability of the publication.

It’s the same with the Saints books. Readers who are unaware of the bias of the editors in favor of accommodating M2C will not recognize, let alone understand, the censorship of references to Cumorah.

“These so-called citation cartels have been around for decades, as the publishing consultant Phil Davis has pointed out. Thomson Reuters, which until recently owned the Impact Factor for ranking journals, has even sanctioned periodicals for evidence of cartel behavior…. For authors, the payoff is clear: The more citations your articles generate, the more influential they appear. And journals have similar incentives: Encourage authors to cite papers that appear in your pages and you’ve created the illusion that your journal is highly influential.”

https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/13/citation-cartels-science/

“In this perspective, our goal is to present and elucidate a thus far largely overlooked problem that is arising in scientific publishing, namely the identification and discovery of citation cartels in citation networks. Taking from the well-known definition of a community in the realm of network science, namely that people within a community share significantly more links with each other as they do outside of this community, we propose that citation cartels are defined as groups of authors that cite each other disproportionately more than they do other groups of authors that work on the same subject.” 

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphy.2016.00049/full

We wonder, why would LDS intellectuals reject the consistent, persistent teachings of the prophets about the New York Cumorah? Why would they insist that the events in the Book of Mormon took place in the confined area of Mesoamerica? Why would they teach their students and followers that the Nephites were Mayans, that the Book of Mormon describes Mayan culture, and that Joseph Smith didn’t translate the book correctly because he was unfamiliar with Mayan culture?

On this blog and in my books, especially Mesomania, we’ve discussed these issues but today I’d like to mention one particularly influential explanation. This is the idea that the New York Cumorah, along with the Urim and Thummim and other elements of early Church history, were invented communal stories that early LDS created to understand their world.

Brant A. Gardner, a thoughtful scholar and faithful LDS who is a great guy, is deeply committed to M2C. He is one of the more influential M2C promoters due to his involvement with the M2C citation cartel and his activity on the Internet. He curates comments at the Interpreter and has written several M2C-promoting books and articles.

The basic premise of M2C is that the “real” Cumorah of Mormon 6:6 is in southern Mexico. This means that the Three Witnesses, each of whom identified the “hill in New York” as Cumorah, were mistaken.

Not only them, but Joseph Smith (as related by others, and D&C 128:20), as well as all the LDS Church leaders who reiterated the teaching about the NY Cumorah, were expressing personal opinions based on a false tradition and they were wrong.

That sounds incredible to many faithful LDS, but you can ask any M2C believer and see for yourself. Usually, they will try to avoid the question. Most CES and BYU teachers, for example, have been told to say something such as “I don’t care about the geography, because the purpose of the book is to testify of Christ.”

No faithful person disagrees with that, of course; it’s a red herring fallacy, sometimes used to imply that anyone who does care about the setting of the Book of Mormon is unfaithful, belligerent, contentious, or naive. And yet, we have a long list of prophets who have taught that Cumorah was in New York. It was a key defense of the Restoration in Oliver Cowdery’s letters IV, VII and VIII.

http://www.lettervii.com/

Both CES and BYU use an M2C-inspired fantasy map to teach the Book of Mormon, so their protestations that geography doesn’t matter ring hollow. If you persist in seeking their explanation for their belief in M2C, it will come down to their conviction that the prophets were wrong.

And so we wonder, why do they think the prophets were wrong?

One reason is the rationale offered in Brant’s book, The Gift and Power: Translating the Book of Mormon. Published in 2011, the book is divided into three parts that explain Brant’s views on

(i) the translation process,

(ii) what kind of translation the Book of Mormon is, and

(iii) how Joseph translated with a seer stone.

Sample chapters include:
Understanding Joseph: Magician or Prophet?
What is a Magic Worldview?
Joseph’s Two Palmyras:
  Christianity and Christian Magic in Joseph’s Palmyra
  The English Heritage of American Magic
Magic in Palmyra: Divining Rods and Seer Stones

and, finally:

Important Stories, Told Importantly
  A Transcript Becomes a Sealed Book
  Interpreters Become the Urim and Thummim
  A Hill Becomes Cumorah
  Indians Become Lamanites
  Reformed Egyptian Becomes Hebrew
_____

Like many other LDS historians, Brant proposes that the accounts of early Church events were the product of a process of creating a communal story.

The process of working out the communal story explains a number of items from the early Church histories. Theirs was a living community that was building its self-identity in the face of strong persecutions. Their stories helped make sense of their present community, even though they were stories told of previous times. This is simply a normal process of memory. As Michael Schudson… explains, “Memory selects and distorts in the service of present interests…”

The second explanation is how the Saints constructed their past. It was a manipulation intended to make sense of the present.

In the section titled “A Transcript Becomes a Sealed Book,” Brant explains that when Martin Harris visited Professor Anthon, Martin “had to recall something fairly close to the reported phrase [from Isaiah] or he and Joseph would not have so completely connected the Anthon incident with the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy… After studying Isaiah further, the association was made complete and the remember phrase became precise. From that point on, the Book of Mormon became important as a sealed book. The internal references to a spiritual sealing were transformed into  physically sealed portion.”

In “Interpreters Become the Urim and Thummim,” Brant says that “The communal association of Urim and Thummim with any of the instruments used in the translation became such a common description that it fed into Joseph Smith’s vocabulary and descriptions. Not only did the community use that description, but Joseph, who certainly knew what a seer stone was called, eventually used the terms Urim and Thummim for them as well. That name for the interpreters or seer stones was inserted into sections of the Doctrine and Covenants instead of other possible names.”

In “A Hill Becomes Cumorah,” Brant explains the origin of the supposedly false tradition of the New York Cumorah. He writes, “Joseph’s use of the term [Cumorah] in 1842 is similar to his use of Urim and Thummim for the interpreters and the seer stones. Although he was in a perfect position to know a different name and to correct the Saints, what we see is that the Saints’ communal interpretation of history also fed Joseph’s vocabulary and therefore influenced descriptions of that history. Joseph not only allowed the communal creation of the Church’s history; he embraced it. The sacralization of the New York hill by association with Cumorah tapped into the miraculous nature of the discovery and translation of the plates. Nevertheless, the connection appears to have been made upon a misreading of the text.”

Brant doesn’t address Letter VII or the teachings of the prophets, but he does mention David Whitmer’s statement about the messenger who took the Harmony plates to Cumorah. Here is his explanation:

“This report would be much more conclusive had it not been recorded nearly fifty years later. The passage of time and the accepted designation of ‘Cumorah’ as the name of the New York hill by the time of the recollection argues against this second-hand report from Whitmer as being a definitive statement.”

Although this account was provided nearly fifty years later, the specificity of David’s recollection–that this was the first time he heard the word Cumorah–is a strong indicator of accuracy and veracity. Besides, there is evidence David was relating this incident on the road to Fayette as early as 1832. We discussed that before here:

http://www.bookofmormoncentralamerica.com/2016/05/note-on-cumorah-david-whitmer-and-zina.html

There are numerous other accounts from early Church history about Cumorah, including one that Lucy Mack Smith quoted Joseph saying in early 1827 before he even got the plates. For more info, see

http://www.bookofmormoncentralamerica.com/2015/08/david-whitmer.html

http://www.bookofmormoncentralamerica.com/2020/06/glad-tidings-from-mexico.html

http://www.bookofmormoncentralamerica.com/2016/07/the-hill-cumorah-storehouse-and.html

http://www.bookofmormoncentralamerica.com/2019/02/great-example-of-persuasion-vs-education.html

http://www.bookofmormoncentralamerica.com/2019/06/dan-bmc-and-deferring-to-scholars.html

It is vitally important to know that our changing memory is not a flaw but a feature of what it is like to be human. For it is this “memory drift” that allows us to “forgive and forget” and to grow. What was a crisis memory in the past may become less so in later perspective.

https://twitter.com/BrianRoemmele/status/1299698551300087809

The most important understanding of the Human Brain is that memories are not stored in the brain a static thing.

We store memories in a dynamic way that keeps changing the perspective and relationships the memories have with each other.

Our memories keep changing and adjusting