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{{To learn more box:responses to: Richard and Joan Ostling}} 
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|L=Criticism of Mormonism/Books/Mormon America: The Power and the Promise
|H=Response to ''Mormon America: The Power and the Promise''
|T=''Mormon America: The Power and the Promise''
|A=Richard N. Ostling and Joan K. Ostling
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{{H2
|L=Criticism of Mormonism/Books/Mormon America: The Power and the Promise
|H=Response to ''Mormon America: The Power and the Promise'', a work by Richard N. Ostling and Joan K. Ostling
|S=
|L1=Response to claims made in Mormon America: "Introduction: A New World Faith"
|L2=Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 1: Sealed with Blood"
|L3=Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 2: Beginnings: A Very American Gospel"
|L4=Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 3: The American Exodus"
|L5=Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 4: Polygamy Then and Now"
|L6=Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 5: Redefining the Kingdom of God"
|L7=Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 6: Almost Mainstream"
|L8=Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 7: Mormons, Inc."
|L9=Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 8: Some Latter-day Stars"
|L10=Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 9: The Power Pyramid"
|L11=Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 10: Families Forever"
|L12=Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 11: A Peculiar People"
|L13=Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 12: Rituals Sacred and Secret"
|L14=Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 13: Two by Two"
|L15=Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 14: Saintly Indoctrination"
|L16=Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 15: Faithful History"
|L17=Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 16: The Gold Bible"
|L18=Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 17: Discovering 'Plain and Precious Things'"
|L19=Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 18: 'How God Came to Be God'"
|L20=Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 19: Are Mormons Christians? Are Non-Mormons Christians?"
|L21=Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 20: Rivals and Antagonists"
|L22=Response to claims made in Mormon American "Chapter 21: Dissenters and Exiles"
|L23=Response to claims made in Mormon America "Chapter 22: Mormonism in the Twenty-first Century"
|L24=Quote mining, misrepresentation and manipulation in Mormon America: The Power and the Promise
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{{:Criticism of Mormonism/Books/Mormon America: The Power and the Promise/Chapter 22}}
{{:Criticism of Mormonism/Books/Mormon America: The Power and the Promise/Quote mining}}


==About this work==

{{Epigraph|Should non-Mormons write a book about Mormonism? The coauthors, are, admittedly, conventional Protestants...the outsiders will find some fascinating information and want to learn even more. And the insiders will see themselves portrayed fairly while learning some things they would not have known otherwise.<br>&mdash;Preface, ''Mormon America: The Power and the Promise''}}

{{Epigraph|''Mormon America is very much like two books in one. The first depicts individual Latter-day Saints "as a model minority, a hardworking people with more education than the American average, deeply committed to church and family" (p. xxiv)...Yet in the second part, when the Ostlings begin to discuss the church's doctrines, its history, and its leaders, they paint a landscape that, to a knowledgeable Latter-day Saint, is selective with a bias toward the sensational.<br>&mdash;Raymond Takashi Swenson, ''Faith without Caricature?'', 2001}}

{{Epigraph|''[T]he Ostlings do not want to seem openly or stridently hostile toward the Saints. They are, instead, condescending in ways that are analogous to the way virtually every community of believers gets treated by journalists, including evangelicals and their allies. But at times the Ostlings drop the guise of balanced, objective reporters.<br>&mdash;Louis Midgley, ''Faulty Topography'', 2002}}

==Reviews of the Work==
{{MaxwellInstituteBar
|link=https://publications.mi.byu.edu/fullscreen/?pub=1455&index=10
|title=Faulty Topography
|author=Louis Midgley
|publication=FARMS Review of Books
|vol=14
|num=1/2
|date=2002
|summary=The Ostlings recognize that "the Book of Mormon was controversial from the outset" (p. 261). They also realize that, "from the beginning to this day, the reaction of Book of Mormon readers has been divided between those committed to it as ancient literature and those who consider it a product of the nineteenth century" (p. 261). They argue that these "older polemical traditions" also "split on two sides of a simple prophet/fraud dichotomy: either Joseph Smith was everything he claimed to be, a true prophet entrusted with a new scripture from authentic ancient golden plates, or he was a charismatic fraud" (p. 261). They exploit the fact that recently a few authors operating on the fringes of the Mormon academic community, while denying that Joseph Smith was a genuine prophet and the Book of Mormon an authentic ancient text, have striven to avoid directly charging him with being a conscious fraud. The Ostlings are correct in claiming that some of these writers recognize that a "simple prophet/fraud dichotomy" does not exhaust all possible explanations (p. 261). They then indicate that "some participants in [the] current discussion" over the historical authenticity of the Book of Mormon, while rejecting its authenticity, "would like to carve out a middle path" (p. 261) somewhere between its being read as an authentic ancient text and as a nineteenth-century sham. This effort by a few cultural Mormons, dissidents, and former Latter-day Saints is then turned by the Ostlings into a main component of their campaign against the Book of Mormon.
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