This article originally appeared in the Deseret News.
Matt Fradd has done some remarkable good in the past, dating back to his book on “Exposing the Reality Behind the Fantasy of Pornography.”
But in late February, Fradd had a conversation with Catholic apologist Joe Heschmeyer on his Daily Wire show “Pints with Aquinas”— Fradd playing the role of a naive interlocutor inquiring about the faith, without any Latter-day Saint in the room.
The show was titled “The Incoherence of Mormonism” and portrayed the faith as not worth engaging seriously.
Talking ‘about’ others
There are strategic advantages to framing a conversation without the subject in the room, of course. We see it on cable news with liberals talking about conservatives or conservatives about liberals.
Free from clarification or balance by the person in question, you can really put on a show. And that’s what Fradd did in his conversation with Heschmeyer.
Yet punctuated by incredulous looks and knowing laughs, these conversation partners quickly gave away the game. The overall tone resembled family members trading stories about an eccentric relative they both know is crazy.
This could all be avoided by inviting a Latter-day Saint to join. Snide remarks would likely go away, along with impulses to call the faith by its nickname (“Mormon” 124 times) rather than the name it’s asked to be referred by. Or to call beliefs you don’t like “bananas” or an “absurdity.”
This would also keep the conversation more honest — less likely to subtly distort others’ views — such as suggesting Latter-day Saints look to a God who is “just kind of powerless.”
Heschmeyer did acknowledge how often Latter-day Saints have been an object of “mockery and derision by a lot of Americans,” although he failed to appreciate how cynical caricatures lay the groundwork for continued derision.
Latter-day Saint influencer Jackson Wayne described the podcast as another instance where the faith’s beliefs are “sensationalized, caricaturized or displayed in a way that has kernels of truth, but ultimately is misrepresented to a point that it seems so absurd and antithetical to Christianity.”
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