Most of the people who work at and contribute to the Interpreter Foundation are serious, respectable, faithful, and diligent scholars. They've made useful contributions to Latter-day Saint scholarship, offered new insights, and provoked thoughtful consideration of important issues. They have earned our respect and gratitude for their work.
Plus, they're nice people (so long as you don't disagree with them in any substantial way.*)
But as the saying goes, a rotten apple spoils the barrel.
In the "Peter Pan" saga, we have a few "interpreters" who adopted and promoted a false, racist pseudonym that they published in their own journal, as discussed here:
https://www.bookofmormoncentralamerica.com/2023/04/clown-world-m2c-citation-cartel-and.html
In a series of upcoming posts, we'll discuss these "interpreters" in more detail.
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*Their intolerance of alternative perspectives may be an inevitable result of them working under the rubric of "Interpreter." As "interpreters," they have a congealed worldview, built on their internally derived consensus, that they seem obsessed with defending at all costs.
Why honorable scholars choose to identify as "interpreters" this way remains a bit perplexing. First, they ripped the name right out of the scriptures and applied it to themselves as self-appointed "interpreters" of scripture and doctrine for those of us who don't qualify as part of their credentialed class. Then they adopted an editorial bias focused on persuading people that Joseph Smith never used the actual interpreters (the Urim and Thummim) but instead relied on SITH (the stone-in-the-hat), as demonstrated in the journal and in the movie "Witnesses."
There could not possibly be a more arrogant and offensive name for a group of scholars than "Interpreter," with the possible exception of Pharisee and Sadducee, people who likewise assumed the role of "interpreters" for their respective followers.
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