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by Zachary Wright

Introduction

Imagine for yourself for a moment that you’re face-to-face with a critic of the church who states “The church is lying to you about its history” or “the church is trying to cover up its past.”  When you ask them what they mean, they explain how the church has suppressed the details behind how a seer stone was used throughout the translation of the Book of Mormon.  They continue “It’s only until the advent of the internet where the church has been forced to be honest.”  What this critic does not know is that this claim is, for the most part, misinformation.  The unfortunate reality is that misinformation can be spread as simply as the example above, and it can have some devastating consequences.

Now, the vast majority of this series has been dedicated to arriving at correct conclusions, and I’ve mostly talked about us using data to build our own arguments and arrive at well-reasoned conclusions.  However, besides my episode on logical fallacies, I haven’t given all that much attention to teaching how to identify bad information.  So far, all my episodes have been working under the assumption that the information I’ve been presenting is accurate.  In reality, this isn’t always the case.  Reality is often very complicated, and the manner in which data is presented can be incorrect, misleading, biased, or otherwise presented in a way that can incorrectly sway our opinion.  Critical thinkers need to be aware of how data can be presented in ways that can lead to incorrect conclusions, so that we don’t fall prey to information that can have lasting negative consequences.  To start, we’ll discuss what misinformation is, and talk about how it can be combated.  Then, we’ll talk about propaganda in a similar way, and finally, we’ll discuss how to protect yourself against bad information.  Let’s get into it.

Misinformation

Before we can launch into describing propaganda, we first need to understand what misinformation is.  Misinformation is described as “incorrect or misleading information” (1).  This kind of information serves critical thinkers very little good because in order to solve problems, we have to acknowledge the effects those problems have in reality.  If we don’t understand the reality of a problem, that is, how that problem affects us in the real world, then we run the risk of implementing ineffective solutions.  Keep this in mind as we proceed through the sources we analyze.

Let’s jump back to the example in the introduction.  For those who don’t know what a seer stone is, the short answer is that it was a small, chocolate-colored stone that Joseph Smith used during the translation process.  This hypothetical critic made the claim that the church was actively hiding the fact that Joseph Smith used a seer stone during the translation process of the Book of Mormon (2).  If this was true, then members of the church who wanted to explain what happened would need to explain not only why Joseph used a seer stone, but also why the church was allegedly hiding the issue.  In other words, those kinds of details would need to be factored into whatever analysis we did on the church and its truth claims.  However, is it true that the church hid it?  Well, the answer is kind of complicated, but I’ve found that it’s actually pretty universally “no.”   For example, we have records of David Whitmer, a witness of the translation process, recording during his lifetime that Joseph Smith used a seer stone during the translation process (3).  We also have Emma Smith, another direct witness, indicating that he used a seer stone as well (4).

This is where things get tricky though.  These are both rather late sources, which if you remember from my article on evaluating historical sources, can sometimes make things a bit more complicated than we’d like.  This led some members and leaders of the church to disbelieve the idea Joseph used a seer stone.  Joseph Fielding Smith, for example, knew that Joseph Smith had the seer stone, but didn’t believe that it was used during the Book of Mormon translation (5).  This sentiment arguably dominated the rhetoric of the time regarding the translation.  However, this certainly wasn’t the unanimous opinion in the 1900s.  We have records of historians such as Richard Lloyd Anderson, alongside apostles Neal A. Maxwell and Russell M. Nelson, who affirmed that Joseph used the seer stone in the hat during the translation a few decades later (6).  As you can see, there’s far more nuance to this issue than meets the eye.

That brings us back to the topic of misinformation.  With this in mind, is it really fair to say that the church as an organization was actively trying to hide the fact that Joseph used a seer stone?  As you can see, this critic’s claim had information that was either misleading or even outrightly untrue.  We have multiple general authorities affirming that Joseph Smith used a seer stone during a portion of the Book of Mormon’s translation.  Was this detail contested?  Sure, but that’s very different from saying that the church was actively, knowingly, and deceptively lying or hiding this issue from the general membership.  Even so, we see this issue rehashed by critics of the church time and time again, despite the claim’s misleading nature.

Before we move on, it’s worth noting that there is some distinction between misinformation and its more devious cousin Disinformation.  Disinformation is described as “false information deliberately and often covertly spread (as by the planting of rumors) in order to influence public opinion or obscure the truth” (7).  To put it another way, misinformation is just information that is incorrect, while disinformation is the intentional use of incorrect information.  Now, I don’t like accusing people of spreading disinformation, because that would be assuming the intent of another person, which is very VERY difficult to prove with any degree of certainty.  I think that Hanlon’s razor may be useful, or at least a variant of it:  Don’t assume malintent when human frailty can account for the same behavior.   Impracticality aside, it’s an important (albeit theoretical) distinction to make, seeing as it entails that we see the purveyor of disinformation in a different light than we see the purveyor of misinformation.

Propaganda

Now, misinformation is definitely a problematic thing, and its presence is felt in a lot of aspects of life and is often implemented in the realm of propaganda.  Propaganda is described as “information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view” (8).  Another source described propaganda as being “dissemination of information—facts, arguments, rumors, half-truths, or lies—to influence public opinion” (9).  As you can imagine, this is often an instrument in much of political discourse, but as you can imagine, propaganda can also be found in a lot of other areas of life, such as in religious discourse.

If we study those definitions carefully, propaganda is focused on this idea of swaying people to agree with you, using a carefully selected concoction of facts and/or misinformation and fallacious reasoning to get people to agree with you.  Researchers seem to agree with the idea that propaganda is information that is disseminated to elicit emotional responses, often using rhetorical devices and vaguely defined terms (10).  However, as some writers have noted, there aren’t a lot of great ways to determine the difference between genuine persuasion and overt manipulation, and consequently, it’s difficult to define propaganda well (11).   For our purposes, we’ll be working off of the definitions above wherein propaganda is more manipulative, biased, and misleading, even when it contains partial truths.

For example, consider this comment I saw on social media recently (source available upon request):

This is an excellent example of propaganda.  It’s a claim made about the church that attempts to elicit an emotional response:  A feeling of unfairness.  It wants us to actively distrust the church, and leave behind the organization that is allegedly extorting money from us “under duress”.  However, if we take some time to unpack this claim, we find it’s stringing together points that don’t make much sense.  I don’t pay tithing because I’m under duress. I pay tithing because I love God and I want to give everything I can to him. I hope my family will do the same, but I recognize that some of them may choose not to. If they don’t want to be around me in Celestial glory, then they don’t have to be around me. I won’t do anything to force them to, and neither will the church.  Think about this for a moment: How could anyone force them?

Now, more could be said on this topic from a theological perspective.  For instance, according to LDS theology, if someone