Senturion and the Iraq Troop Surge

Today I ran across an article about Senturion, which is a predictive political analysis software suite developed by the National Defense University.  Apparently Senturion was used to make highly specific and highly accurate predictions about the Iraq War and the Iraq elections prior to those events. I was astounded at the kinds of things Senturion got right, accurately forecasting the loyalties of the various factions and even the behavior of individuals such as al Sadr and Ahmed Chalabi.

The Senturion results have special significance for the debate over the effects of the 2007 troop surge.  When Senturion was applied to the Iraqi elections in January 2005, it predicted that "increased coalition military strength in Iraq would have improved the attitudes of Iraqi stake holders toward the election by making them feel more secure." The simulations indicated that a 50% increase in troop strength was optimal, though a 25% increase would have been sufficient to capture the support of "neutral Iraqis". It also determined that due to Iraqi perceptions, the use of United Nations peacekeepers in place of US or coalition forces could achieve the same results with a smaller troop increase. These analyses were "performed and briefed to senior government decisionmakers well in advance of events."

So far as I know, no one but me has linked Senturion's predictions to the troop surge of 2007.  (It's now on Wikipedia, but only because I put it there.)  Given the accuracy of Senturion's predictions in other respects, however, its findings vis-a-vis the prospects of a troop increase would seem to have implications for the debate over whether the surge was responsible for the rise in Iraqi popular support that followed.  Senturion's predictions were mathematical and non-partisan, and unrelated to the debate that emerged after the Iraq Study Group's report in 2006 about the possibility of a troop surge.

Outside Looking In

This week I made a guest appearance on the Mormon Expression podcast, in an episode titled "Outside Looking In."  I was joined in the podcast by evangelical bloggeress Bridget Jack Meyers of ClobberBlog, as well as host John Larsen and regular panelist George.  Among other things, we discussed the evangelical countercult movement, our experiences with Mormon culture, and the things we find compelling and/or problematic about the Mormon Church.  Thanks to John for having us on!

The Insomuch/Inasmuch Shift and Mosiah Priority

I've discussed before Brent Metcalfe's finding that during the dictation of the Book of Mormon Joseph Smith gradually shifted his preference from the word "therefore" to the roughly synonymous term "wherefore". When the word ratios are graphed, the shift clearly supports Mosiah priority (that is, the theory that Smith dictated Mosiah through the end of the Book before dictating 1 Nephi through Words of Mormon).

In order to extend Brent's study, I looked at the Book of Mormon's use of the roughly synonymous terms "inasmuch" and "insomuch", as graphed below.  The results here are nowhere near as striking as the therefore/wherefore case, but it does appear to me that the Mosiah priority curve is somewhat smoother. (Note that the results for Jarom and Omni are exaggerated because of the short length of those books. Books in which neither "insomuch" nor "inasmuch" occur are excluded from the graphs.)

Under Mosiah priority, the results seem to show a slow shift in preference from "insomuch" to "inasmuch". Under 1 Nephi priority, the opposite is true. Unfortunately, the D&C revelations for the Book of Mormon translation period provide no material for comparison. (The instance of "inasmuch" in D&C 3:16 is a later addition.) However, Joseph's later revelations exhibit an overwhelming preference for "inasmuch". This would seem to support the Mosiah priority findings.

PageRanking the Mormon Studies Journals

In an effort to get a very general idea of what impact the various Mormon Studies journals are having in the field, I used Google's PageRank system on each of their home pages. As a baseline comparison, note that the very successful Christian journal Church History has a score of 5/10. My blog has a score of 3/10. Now, note that this is a wholly unscientific scoring system. We could get a better idea of the journals' impacts by using something like the "impact factor" used in the hard sciences. PageRanks will tend to be higher if a journal is viewable online, or if its web page has lots of other content (like blogs and news and the like). It will tend to be lower if people commonly bypass the homepage, i.e. by linking directly to particular articles from off-site.

Anyway, the winner rather surprised me. The International Journal of Mormon Studies took the cake with a score of 6/10.

The runners up were Dialogue, Sunstone, Segullah, and the Journal of Mormon History with 4/10. Next came the JWHA Journal with 2/10.

The Maxwell Institute journals did surprisingly poorly. The FARMS Review scored 1/10, whereas JBMORS, Studies in the Bible and Antiquity, and the FARMS Occasional Papers all scored 0/10. Since the individual home pages of these journals are unremarkable (albeit about on par with the JMH and JWHA Journal's pages), I also gauged the Maxwell Institute main page. It scored 4/10. It would seem that FARMS's fame is somewhat out of proportion to its e-readership. (I expected these numbers to be quite a bit higher, especially given that you can read these journals online.)

ADDENDUM:
A few I missed: The Mormon Review (3/10), Element: A Journal of Mormon Philosophy and Theology (3/10), Irreantum (3/10).

What Is Compelling About Mormonism?

My friend John Williams asked at Mormon Discussions, "What do you find compelling about Mormonism?" It's a great question, and I thought I'd take a crack at it here.  For clarity's sake, I've broken this down into three different senses of the word "compelling".

Mormonism is appealing to me for these reasons:

1) harmonization of biblical exclusivism with a more satisfying universalism
2) continuing revelation and the idea of an open canon
3) strong family and community support structures
4) experiential basis

Mormonism is interesting to me for these reasons:

1) the mystery (what made Joseph Smith tick?)
2) the weirdness (what can I say, I love sci-fi)
3) the psychology (the ways members cope with very real difficulties)
4) the potential (i.e., to become a major global faith)

Mormonism is convincing to me for these reasons:

1) a fair degree of biblical, early church, and ancient Jewish support for its "fringe" theological views
2) some reasonably persuasive arguments for Book of Mormon Hebraisms and the like

Good Things Come in Small Packages: Orson Scott Card's "A War of Gifts"

(Review of Orson Scott Card, A War of Gifts: An Ender Story [New York: Tor, 2007]. 126 pp., $12.95; ISBN: 0765312824.)

Great stories sometimes crop up where you least expect them. I certainly did not expect to find one when I picked up Orson Scott Card’s A War of Gifts. At first glance, it seemed to be everything I hate in a novel. A thirteen dollar price tag for 126 pages of loosely-packed text. A layout designed to appeal to a young-adult audience. A storyline targeted only at diehard fans of a well-established series. A Christmas story, ostensibly meant for seasonal marketing. A title and cover blurb suggestive of specious right-wing histrionics about the Left’s “war on Christmas”. Normally I would consign such a book to the dust bin without thinking twice. But this was by Orson Scott Card, after all, so I decided to give it a chance. I was pleasantly surprised.

True, A War of Gifts takes barely an afternoon to read. But in that short space Card manages to create in Zeck Morgan a very sophisticated character, and to imbue his fairly complex storyline with several layers of allegorical meaning.

Zeck Morgan is a genius child who has grown up in a Puritan Christian cult of which his father is the prophet and leader. The cult, called the Church of the Pure Christ, is based in Eden, North Carolina. The name of the town is significant because in Zeck’s eyes it is a paradise. Although Zeck has scars and open wounds on his back from his father’s use of corporal punishment to “purify” his son, Zeck truly believes that his father is the holiest man in the world. When soldiers come to take young Zeck away to Battle School, he refuses to go on the grounds that he is a pacifist. When they take him anyway, he spends all his time there defying them in the hope that his teachers will give up and send him home.

Eventually, aided by Ender, Zeck comes to understand that his father taught pacifism only to talk himself out of compulsively beating his son, and that Zeck wants to go back home not out of love for his father but out of fear that his father will turn his violence on his mother. Eden was in fact never truly a paradise, but rather a place of ignorance. His mother had actually wanted him to go to Battle School, because she knew that he could only awaken and thrive if finally he was freed from his father’s influence. Latter-day Saints will hear echoes here of their Church’s teaching that the Fall from Eden was not really a Fall at all, but rather a fortunate and necessary awakening (2 Nephi 2:22-25; Moses 5:11).

There are other echoes of LDS teaching in the story, found in a surprising place: on the lips of Card’s arrogant, legalistic cultists. They teach, for example, that women deserve respect because they suffer to bring souls into the world (38), that ministers should be unpaid and should work to earn their living (20), that discipline is important for children’s souls (24), and even that Genesis was simply the best Moses could do in explaining Darwinian evolution to a pre-scientific culture (40-41). Yet Card is not, by placing these doctrines on hypocrites’ lips, polemicizing against the content of the teaching. Rather, he approves the doctrines but rejects the way they are flaunted in order to prove the superior holiness of the community. Card clarifies the sin of the community when he has Zeck proudly clarify that the cultists are not “fundamentalists”, but “Puritans” (41).

So why does Card place LDS doctrine on the cultists’ lips? Perhaps because he is polemicizing against self-righteousness and hypocrisy in the Mormon community, and wants Mormons to see themselves reflected in this fictional sect. Certainly when we are told that Zeck’s unhappy mother “always smiled when she knew people were looking … to show that the pure Christian life made one happy” (13), the scene is one that echoes a common liberal Mormon criticism of conservative Mormon culture.

Does the book intend to comment on the “war on Christmas” so lamented every December by conservative talking heads? Perhaps. But if it does, then it does not do so in a straightforward way. Certainly Zeck becomes angry when the leaders of Battle School forbid him to practice his Christian faith but do not forbid observation of traditions about Santa Claus (67)—basically the same complaint raised by the Religious Right. But the narrative seems ambivalent about whether the complaint is really a valid one.

For Battle School’s Santa-observers, the complaint is an illegitimate one because Santa Claus is not a religious symbol but an international and cultural one (72). The acts of love and generosity Santa inspires are especially distinct from Zeck’s Puritan brand of religion in that the former bring people together whereas the latter drives them apart (78-81). Card clearly sees fundamentalism as a divisive, false kind of religion that is often simply a cover for our own vices (114-17). When Zeck manages to rile some Muslim students and to get them to pray in open defiance of the rules, other boys chastise him for promoting potentially destructive religious sectarianism (93).

On the other hand, there are hints in the story that Card does see religious and cultural traditions as being on the same footing in at least some respects. As long as religion is peaceful and committed to values like love and generosity—which he indicates even Islam is capable of embracing (90)—religion, like culture, is part of what makes human life worth living. It makes us who we are, and gives us a reason to go on living (74). It is a good thing, and it should not be suppressed.

In the end, War of Gifts offers no clear verdict on the much-bewailed attempt of some Leftists to take Christ out of Christmas. If there is a “war on Christmas” that the novel clearly condemns, it is actually the attempt of some Rightists to make a Satan out of Santa. That crusade Card satirizes without mercy (17-19).

Cramming all this complexity into so few pages is no small feat. Whether it is worth thirteen dollars for three hours of enjoyable reading of course remains an open question, but if nothing else, A War of Gifts demonstrates Card’s dedication to his craft. For any other author the plan of this book would have been a recipe for drudgery. In Card’s hands it was a labor of love.

Who Authored the Mormon Couplet?

The Mormon doctrine of deity is frequently expressed in the famous couplet, "As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may become." Typically this couplet is attributed to Lorenzo Snow. Recently Clair Barrus argued on his blog that Brigham Young is the true author. His argument was overstated, and he has since edited the post to soften his conclusion. Nevertheless, Barrus highlights a fascinating discrepancy in the sources: Brigham Young and Lorenzo Snow each claimed that this was a special revelation to himself.

Here is how Snow told the story to his sister Eliza:

The Spirit of the Lord rested mightily upon me the eyes of my understanding were opened, and I saw as clear as the sun at noonday, with wonder and astonishment, the pathway of God and man. I formed the following couplet which expresses the revelation, as it was shown me: "As man now is, God once was: As God now is, man may be." I felt this to be a sacred communication, which I related to no one except my sister Eliza, until I reached England, when in a confidential private conversation with President Brigham Young, in Manchester, I related to him this extraordinary manifestation. (Eliza R. Snow, Biography and Family Record of Lorenzo Snow, Salt Lake City: Deseret News Co., 1884, pp. 9–10.)

This account dates Snow's revelation to 1840, just prior to his mission to England. Snow's son LeRoi later claimed that Snow told Joseph Smith of the experience upon returning to Nauvoo in 1843, and Smith confirmed that it was a true revelation (LeRoi C. Snow, Improvement Era, June 1919, p. 656). Possibly Snow's revelation influenced Smith's famous King Follett Discourse, which claimed, "God himself was once as we are now . . . you have got to learn to become gods yourselves . . . the same as all gods have done before you."

Contrary to Snow's telling of the story, however, we have the following account of an 1849 meeting where Young claimed that he was the one to whom the couplet was revealed in England:

Brother Lorenzo Snow made some remarks on the character of Jesus Christ, and asked for light. I replied:

While on a mission to England, the following came forcibly to my mind -- As God was, so are we now; as he now is, so we shall be.

Although Young told the story in response to a question from Snow, Snow apparently didn't jump up and shout, "You big fat liar! That was my revelation!" So we have a puzzling dilemma. Who do we believe? And why the discrepancy?

One possibility is that Lorenzo Snow's biography misreports one or more aspects of these events. It is framed and phrased as an autobiography, but Eliza Snow is named on the title page as the author. Additional research is required to determine whether the work reflects the mind of Lorenzo, or merely of his sister-- and whether the claim that Lorenzo authored the couplet is repeated in other primary sources.

Another possibility is that one or the other of these men was misremembering the course of events. Perhaps, for example, Snow had the revelation, but Young formulated the couplet. (The fact that both men claimed revelation, though, complicates this explanation. One wouldn't think that they'd misremember something like that.)

Alternatively, Young may have claimed the experience for himself in order to keep Snow's experience confidential, or in order to make the doctrine authoritative. (We might imagine Young telling this story to Snow with a wink and a nudge.) Or perhaps Young had had the same insight Snow had had, which is what sparked the conversation in Manchester in the first place.

What is clear is that further research is required. I glanced through Snow's letters and journals on the Special Collections DVD, but didn't turn up anything couplet-related. A search of Young's vast corpus of letters and journals might be more fruitful, but would also be an enormously time-consuming project. But still, a mystery this important shouldn't remain unsolved. The researcher who cracks this case will get at least a journal article out of it, so all you grad students need to get crackin'!

Moises Sandoval's On the Move

Moises Sandoval's On the Move is an attempt to write a very basic history of the Hispanic church in the United States. Sandoval writes from the perspective of the poor and oppressed, and also works hard to encompass the full diversity of the Hispanic church (ix-xi). (It is debatable how well he succeeds in this endeavor, since Central and South Americans receive scant treatment compared to Mexicans.) Not surprisingly, the book ends up being more than just a history: it is also a call for reform. Sandoval shows that Hispanics have been and continue to be neglected by the US Roman Catholic Church, despite the fact that demographically speaking, they are the Church's future (163-68).

By far the most interesting aspect of Sandoval's history was the history of racism against Hispanics in the United States. I had no idea of the extent and brutality of that history, which is comparable in some respects to the history of racism against African Americans. The number of Mexicans lynched in the Southwest in the late nineteenth century, for example, was greater than the number of blacks lynched in the old South (38-39). And the lynchings were only the most visible and ostentatious forms of violence. Huge numbers of Mexicans were massacred along the border, including by the misremembered Texas Rangers (65-66). Although the the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 made Hispanics the legal equals of whites, the treaty was largely ignored. Whites treated Hispanics with contempt, killed them quite freely, and exploited them economically (37-40). It is very sad that this aspect of our nation’s racist history has been so widely forgotten.

Unfortunately, systemic Anglo racism affected the church as well as the state. Hispanics were deposed and systematically excluded from the Catholic priesthood, and the Hispanic church was viewed by the hierarchy as superstitious and impure. Ministry to Hispanics was strictly secondary to ministry to Anglos. And when Anglos did take notice of Hispanics, it was often because their piety was seen as an embarrassment to Catholicism. When the civil rights movimiento emerged in the 1960's, its main focus was the right of Hispanic workers to unionize (121-27). But there was also a strong current in the movimiento that sought to change the Church. Not only were there still almost no Hispanic clergy in the Church, but the Church had also recently integrated many of its parishes and demanded that Hispanics abandon their language and culture. Vatican II and the emergence of liberation theology helped pave the way for Hispanics to challenge the Church on these issues.

Many of the issues the movimiento faced vis-a-vis the Catholic Church were generated by the Church's efforts to be perceived as "American" in a heavily white Protestant culture. Catholic leaders hoped that the Church could be an agent in pushing the Hispanic population to assimilate. Ironically, these efforts actually hurt the Church in the long run, because the more that Hispanics assimilated, the less likely they were to join the priesthood. Thus the Church's historic push toward assimilation contributed substantially to the present shortage of priests (77-82).

Although things have improved to some degree today, the effects of the events of this period are still felt in the Hispanic church in the form of a severe shortage of Hispanic priests and limited fund allocation to Hispanic parishes (164, 166). The Church has become more supportive of Hispanic piety, but continues to have an Anglo bias (95, 164-66). Considering the extremely low fertility rates of the white population and the Catholic Church's recent decline in its historic white New England centers, it appears that Hispanics are the US Church's future. Presumably things will improve as the Church figures out which side of its bread is buttered.

George Whitefield, Lance Bass of the 18th c.

Since the 18th century didn't have pop stars, they went gaga (no pun intended) over preachers instead. I love Nathan Cole's account of the excitement Whitefield generated when he came to town:

...there came a messenger and said Mr. Whitefield ... is to preach at Middletown this morning at ten of the Clock. I was in my field at Work. I dropt my tool that I had in my hand and went home to my wife telling her to make ready to go and hear Mr. Whitefield preach at Middletown, then run to my pasture for my horse. I with my wife soon mounted the horse and went forward as fast as I thought the horse could bear, ... we improved every moment to get along as if we were fleeing for our lives; all the while fearing we should be too late to hear the Sermon, for we had twelve miles to ride double in little more than an hour ...

And when we came within about half a mile or a mile of the Road that comes down from Hartford Weathersfield and Stepney to Middletown, on high land before me I saw a Cloud of fogg rising; ... I heard a noise something like a low rumbling thunder and presently found it was the noise of Horses feet coming down the Road and this Cloud was a Cloud of dust made by the Horses feet; ... it seemed like a steady Stream of horses and their riders, scarcely a horse more than his length behind another, all of a Lather and foam with sweat, their breath rolling out of their nostrils every Jump, every horse seemed to go with all his might to carry his rider to hear news from heaven for the saving of Souls. ...

We went down in the Stream but heard no man speak a word all the way for 3 miles but every one pressing forward in great haste and when we got to Middletown old meeting house there was a great Multitude it was said to be 3 or 4,000 of people Assembled together; we dismounted and shook off our Dust; and the ministers were then Coming to the meeting house. I turned and looked towards the Great River and saw the ferry boats Running swift backward and forward bringing over loads of people and the Oars Rowed nimble and quick, every thing, men horses and boats seemed to be Struggling for life. The land and banks over the river looked black with people and horses all along the twelve miles I saw no man at work in his field, but all seemed to be gone.

On another occasion there was a stampede at one of Whitefield's meetings when the sound of a breaking board triggered fears that the balcony was collapsing under the weight of so many people. Several were trampled, and some jumped from the balcony. Five were killed.

The most remarkable thing about all of this, probably, is that Whitefield didn't exactly look like a superstar. The following image and caption are from David Holmes's The Faiths of the Founding Fathers:

You can say that again!