1972–2015

The September Six

Six Latter-day Saint scholars and feminists disciplined in one month, 1993

In September 1993 the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints excommunicated five writers and disfellowshipped a sixth, all in Utah, all charged with apostasy or conduct unbecoming a member. The six — Lynne Kanavel Whitesides, Avraham Gileadi, Maxine Hanks, Paul Toscano, D. Michael Quinn and Lavina Fielding Anderson — had published on Mormon history, feminist theology and ecclesiastical authority. The month capped two decades of widening conflict between the institution and the scholars who wrote about it, and it reshaped what Latter-day Saints could safely say in print.

What is actually in dispute

Whether the six were disciplined for writing history and theology or for a sustained public campaign against the Church and its leaders; and whether the councils were local decisions, as the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve stated in January 1994, or a coordinated purge directed from Church headquarters, as the disciplined scholars and their defenders say.

Camelot and its ending

In January 1972 the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints did something it had never done. It gave the office of Church Historian, held since the 1840s by apostles functioning as administrators, to a professional historian. Leonard J. Arrington reorganised the old Historian's Office into a Historical Department with a History Division under him, hired a staff of young academics, opened the archives, and set out to write a sixteen-volume history of the Church for its sesquicentennial.1

Davis Bitton, one of his two assistant Church historians, later called the decade a golden one, 'a brief period of excitement and optimism — that someone has likened to Camelot.' He also wrote the sentence that everyone quotes next: 'But it came to an end.'2 The ending was administrative rather than dramatic. The sixteen-volume history was cancelled. Long-range projects were refused. The division was allowed to shrink by attrition. In 1978 Arrington's title was quietly changed from Church Historian to Director of the History Division. By 1980 he and a core of seven historians had been transferred to Brigham Young University as the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute, and by 1982 the physical move was complete — away from the archive whose opening had been the point of the exercise. Access to the collection was restricted at the same time.3

On 25 January 1982 Arrington received a letter from the First Presidency extending an honorable release. G. Homer Durham was set apart as Church Historian in a private session two weeks later. Neither event was mentioned in general conference or the Church News. In the corridor of the Historical Department where the portraits of the Church historians hang, from Oliver Cowdery forward, Bitton observed that there was no picture of Leonard Arrington. 'Nowhere to be seen,' he wrote. 'Orwell's Truthspeak did not have to wait for 1984.'4

The mantle and the intellect

The argument had been made explicit the previous August. Speaking to religious educators at the fifth annual Church Educational System symposium, apostle Boyd K. Packer delivered 'The Mantle Is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect.' There is no such thing, he said, as an accurate, objective history of the Church without consideration of the spiritual powers that attend the work. 'There is a temptation for the writer or the teacher of Church history to want to tell everything, whether it is worthy or faith promoting or not,' he said. 'Some things that are true are not very useful.' In an effort to be objective, impartial and scholarly, he warned, a writer might unwittingly give equal time to the adversary. 'In the Church we are not neutral. We are one-sided. There is a war going on, and we are engaged in it.'5

Read one way, this is an employer telling employees what their classrooms are for. FAIR makes exactly that argument: Packer named his audience — seminary teachers, institute and BYU men who would teach Church history that year — and it is within a church's purview to insist that the history taught in its own religion classes support faith.6 Read another way, it was heard by everyone in Mormon studies as a description of what history should be, and Latter-day Saint historians answered it in print for the next twenty years. Quinn answered it directly that fall at BYU, in a lecture the Tanners then published without his permission.7

The Church's own scholarly quarterly reprinted the address that summer, which is how it became citable, and how the phrase 'some things that are true are not very useful' entered the permanent vocabulary of the argument.7

A student newspaper in Provo

The Seventh East Press was an independent weekly run by BYU students out of an office off campus. On 11 January 1983 it published Blake Ostler's interview with Sterling M. McMurrin, the University of Utah philosopher who had been United States Commissioner of Education under Kennedy, whose grandfather had been a president of the First Council of Seventy, and whom David O. McKay had personally saved from excommunication in 1954 with the promise that if they put him on trial, 'I will be there as the first witness in your behalf.'8

McMurrin told Ostler he did not believe in the First Vision or in ancient origins for the Book of Mormon. He also went after Packer by name: 'The very title of Apostle Packer's address, "The Mantle Is Far, Far Greater than the Intellect," seems to me to be a betrayal of a very important Mormon idea, that the mantle and the intellect should not be set over against each other. This is destructive of a Mormon ideal.'9

On the afternoon of 9 February the paper's news editor was called to the office. The editor had met with BYU's public relations director and been told the university was 'withdrawing permission for the Seventh East Press to sell or distribute issues on campus.' Who had decided this? The staff asked; the paper reported that the question 'still remains officially unanswered.' They consulted their lawyer, considered a hunger strike, and settled on abstaining from pizza. The Seventh East Press folded on 12 April 1983.10 Two months later a security guard at the Church Office Building named Brent Metcalfe was fired and then permitted to resign; he said he was never given a black-and-white reason, but had been questioned repeatedly about his writing for the paper.11

Forgery and murder

On 15 and 16 October 1985 three pipe bombs went off in Salt Lake City. Two of them killed Steven Christensen and Kathleen Sheets; the third injured the document dealer Mark Hofmann, who was at first a victim and then the prime suspect. Hofmann had been selling the Church and private collectors early Mormon documents of extraordinary interest, most famously a letter attributed to Martin Harris describing a white salamander. In January 1987 he pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder and confessed that the salamander letter was a forgery.12

The effect on this story was double and contradictory. Historians had built arguments on documents that turned out not to exist; the Church had bought forty-eight documents from a man who was fabricating them; senior leaders had defended texts in public that were fakes. Critics concluded that leaders had put embarrassing papers in the vault without authenticating them precisely because they were embarrassing. The Church's response, in the Ensign and since, was that it had relied on competent authorities like other collectors and had been defrauded like everyone else.12

What is not in dispute is the atmosphere afterward. An institution that had opened its archive in 1972 and then closed it in 1980 had now been publicly humiliated by its own documents. The next confrontation would not be about what the archive contained. It would be about who was allowed to talk.

Alternate voices, symposia, and a committee

In April 1989 Dallin H. Oaks preached 'Alternate Voices' in general conference. He allowed that some alternate voices are 'well-motivated men and women who are merely trying to serve their brothers and sisters and further the cause of Zion,' and warned about others. Richard D. Poll, answering Anderson four years later in Dialogue, read the sermon as recognising a category in which many Mormon intellectuals could feel comfortable. Sunstone, looking back, judged that it had expanded the argument beyond historiography to all intellectual discourse, and to the forums where it happened.13

On 23 August 1991, after that summer's Sunstone symposium, the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve issued a joint Statement on Symposia. It named no organisation. It deplored presentations that treated sacred matters inappropriately or could injure the Church, and cautioned members about participating. A poll the following March found that 42 per cent of BYU faculty would not take part in that summer's symposium. Sunstone's own editor described the effect as making presenters more careful; others described it as a chill.14

Then on 6 August 1992, at the thirteenth Sunstone symposium, Lavina Fielding Anderson read a paper describing what she called an internal espionage system that created and maintained secret files on members. In the question period Eugene England, a BYU English professor who had defied his administrators' instruction not to attend, stood up, stabbed the air with his finger and named the body: the Strengthening Church Members Committee. 'I accuse that committee of undermining our Church.' The Associated Press bureau chief, sitting halfway back on the right, got up quietly and walked out to file.15

A week later the First Presidency confirmed the committee's existence. Citing Doctrine and Covenants 123, which enjoins the Saints of 1839 to gather up the names of all persons who had a hand in their oppressions and the libelous publications afloat, the statement said the committee had been appointed to serve as a resource to priesthood leaders, that it was then composed of James E. Faust and Russell M. Nelson, and that its members 'work through established priesthood channels, and neither impose nor direct Church disciplinary action.'16 F. Ross Peterson, the outgoing editor of Dialogue, told the Tribune that comparing Sunstone and Dialogue people to those who were shooting Mormons in 1839 Missouri was unfair, and that files were 'a strange carryover from a paranoia that resembles McCarthyism.' He had himself been interviewed by local leaders two years earlier while they read from a file of photocopies he was not permitted to see.17

The chronology

Anderson's paper became the lead article of Dialogue's Spring 1993 issue: 'The LDS Intellectual Community and Church Leadership: A Contemporary Chronology,' fifty-seven pages of dated entries. She opened by saying the clash between obedience to ecclesiastical authority and the integrity of individual conscience is not one on which Mormonism has a monopoly, and that as she struggled to understand the conflict she returned again and again to the idea of control: both the institution and its intellectuals claim aspects of the same territory and relate to it differently.18

She deliberately did not analyse. 'I present the material that follows as a chronology,' she wrote, 'partly because the basic facts of "what happened" need to be determined before a responsible analysis can be made.' The entries name people, dates, stake presidents, letters, firings, blacklists. They affect, she wrote, 'people's jobs, church service, personal feelings of esteem and worthiness, social relations with ward and stake members, worship in congregations and in temples, feelings of acceptability to God, and even personal spirituality.'19

The same issue carried Paul Toscano's 'A Plea to the Leadership of the Church: Choose Love not Power,' Richard Poll's supporting response to Anderson, and a letter co-signed by Anderson and Janice Allred announcing the Mormon Alliance, an organisation to document what it defined as spiritual abuse: acting without adequate accountability, using position or presumed special understanding in ways that violate agency, injure spiritual growth, coerce compliance, damage self-esteem or demean the dignity of others. The article won Dialogue's essay prize for the year.19

On 18 May 1993, exactly a week after Quinn's stake president wrote to him, Packer told the All-Church Coordinating Council that three dangers had made major invasions into the membership of the Church: 'the gay-lesbian movement, the feminist movement (both of which are relatively new), and the ever-present challenge from the so-called scholars or intellectuals.' Local leaders, he said, must deal with all three with increasing frequency.20

September

The councils were held one at a time over about two weeks, each by a local bishop or stake president, each charging apostasy or conduct unbecoming a member of the Church.

Lynne Kanavel Whitesides went first, on 14 September, before a ward council: her bishop, his two counsellors, a clerk and the ward executive secretary, all men. She had been told she could bring her husband and a friend; on the night the bishop barred her husband too. Her friend Martha Pierce objected in the corridor: 'You are thinking of dissolving this woman's temple marriage. Don't you think he has a vested interest in participating in this council?' Whitesides was disfellowshipped.21

On the morning of 19 September more than a hundred people gathered in the parking lot of the Cottonwood stake centre at six o'clock and sang hymns while Paul Toscano's council sat. He asked that the proceedings be public, that his witnesses stay throughout, that his wife be present, and that an independent party take notes. All four requests were refused. The council had made its own transcript from a cassette of his August Sunstone address, and the discussion turned on whether his remarks about general authorities were derogatory. He emerged after six and a half hours and told the crowd the high councilmen had asked hard but fair-minded questions and that he felt they loved him. He was excommunicated. Maxine Hanks, who had edited Women and Authority, was excommunicated the same day.22

Avraham Gileadi's excommunication was announced in the sacrament meetings of his Santaquin stake. He declined to comment then and has never explained since; Sunstone reported that he was told the grounds were teaching false doctrine, being predatory in teaching his theology, and believing dead prophets over living ones. He is a convert, a Hebraist, doctrinally conservative, and his book had been published by the Church's own Deseret Book.23

Quinn refused to attend. He had been through two councils earlier that year already — probation in May, disfellowshipment a month later for not complying — and had told nobody, not wanting another media sensation. He wrote that the process 'was designed to punish me for being the messenger of unwanted historical evidence and to intimidate me from further work in Mormon history.' His stake president had written back on 11 May that there were 'other matters that I need to talk with you about that are not related to your historical writings. These are very sensitive and highly confidential.' In Quinn's account, when the high council balked at the charge, the stake president blurted out that Packer had been phoning him every week to stress 'the importance of taking action against Michael Quinn,' and told them it was imperative to sustain the Brethren.24

Anderson's council met on 23 September; she did not attend, on the ground that the problem was not at stake level and therefore could not be solved there. Her stake president had told her in May that her membership was in jeopardy if she went on collecting and publicising incidents of ecclesiastical abuse. She had said she could not stop. The letter that arrived on 24 September gave no reason. When she asked what the grounds had been, she was told: apostasy. The night before her council, about two hundred people met for a prayer service at the White Chapel across from the Utah State Capitol; five of the six preached.25

What was said afterward

On 2 October the Salt Lake Tribune printed the tally: 'Three men and three women have been charged with apostasy for their writing and speaking about Mormon subjects. Paul Toscano, Avraham Gileadi, D. Michael Quinn, Maxine Hanks and Lavina Fielding Anderson were excommunicated. Lynne Kanavel Whitesides was disfellowshiped.' General conference opened that weekend. The New York Times ran the story on its front page; National Public Radio carried it with comments from Dallin H. Oaks.25

From the pulpit, James E. Faust told the priesthood session that those who persist in publicly challenging basic doctrines, practices and the establishment of the Church sever themselves from the Spirit of the Lord and forfeit their right to place and influence. Free discussion and expression are encouraged in the Church, he said, but 'the privilege of free expression should operate within limits.' And: 'In some legislative assemblies of the world, there are some groups termed the "loyal opposition." I find no such principle in the gospel of Jesus Christ.'26

In January 1994 the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve issued a formal statement 'in light of extensive publicity given to six recent Church disciplinary councils in Utah.' They deeply regretted the loss of Church membership on the part of anyone. Local officers may seek clarification from general authorities, who have an obligation to teach principles and provide information helpful in counselling members. And then the sentence on which everything turns: 'In matters of Church discipline, the General Authorities do not direct the decisions of local disciplinary councils.'27

That statement and Quinn's account of his stake president cannot both be complete descriptions of what happened, and the corpus contains no document that adjudicates between them. Every appeal was denied. Anderson's stake president wrote that leaders had 'deliberated and pondered carefully and concluded that there was no reason to alter the decision,' and asked him to convey their deep love and concern. 'I read the words,' she told the Tribune. 'I believed they were written sincerely. But somehow, it doesn't feel like love.'28

The cases that came after

The councils did not stop with six. David P. Wright, dismissed from BYU in 1988 for holding the Book of Mormon to be a nineteenth-century text, declined to attend his own council in February 1994, writing to his bishop: 'I cannot negotiate what cannot be negotiated, my God-given right and ability to think and discover.' Brent Metcalfe was expelled for editing New Approaches to the Book of Mormon; Michael Barrett, a CIA lawyer, for writing letters to newspaper editors about Mormonism's differences with mainstream Christianity. Janice Allred was excommunicated in 1995 after a five-hour council examining her theology of God the Mother; Sunstone counted her the eighth high-profile Mormon intellectual expelled since September 1993. Margaret Toscano followed in 2000.29

In December 2002 the anthropologist Thomas W. Murphy was summoned on charges of apostasy after someone sent his essay 'Lamanite Genesis, Genealogy, and Genetics' to his stake president; he was granted a reprieve one day before the scheduled council, in the middle of heavy national coverage. In December 2004 Grant Palmer, who had spent thirty-three years in the Church Educational System, was disfellowshipped after a six-hour hearing for An Insider's View of Mormon Origins. 'I regard myself as heretical regarding some of the Church's teachings,' he said, 'but I don't view myself as an apostate.' He was later told he would have to repudiate essentially every chapter of the book to stay on the records; he resigned instead.30

Two of the September Six came back. Avraham Gileadi was rebaptized in February 1996, the ordinance performed by his nineteen-year-old son and the confirmation by Leaun Otten, the stake president who had excommunicated him, with the whole group of leaders who had sat on that council present. Maxine Hanks returned in 2012 at the invitation of Church leadership, having recanted nothing: 'I simply wanted to restore my membership, as I am.' Lavina Fielding Anderson, who had attended her ward every Sunday for twenty-six years, petitioned for rebaptism in 2019 and was refused by the First Presidency.31

The two most-discussed twenty-first-century cases are Kate Kelly, excommunicated in June 2014 after founding Ordain Women, whose bishop's letter cited an aggressive effort to persuade other members to her point of view and a course of action that threatened to erode the faith of others; and John Dehlin, excommunicated in February 2015, founder of the Mormon Stories podcast and a public supporter of Ordain Women and of same-sex marriage. Writing in Dialogue for the thirtieth anniversary, Jana Riess argued that what links Denver Snuffer, Kelly and Dehlin is not that they criticised — many members have criticised more sharply without consequence — but that all three founded organisations the Church treated as rival institutions.32

What apostasy means, and who decides

The 1989 General Handbook of Instructions had moved apostasy into the category of transgressions for which a disciplinary council must be held — listed, as Riess notes, just under murder and incest — and supplied a three-part definition to remove the previous edition's ambiguity. Apostates are those who repeatedly act in clear, open and deliberate public opposition to the Church or its leaders; who persist in teaching as Church doctrine information that is not Church doctrine after being corrected; or who continue to follow the teachings of apostate cults after being corrected.33

Two things about that definition are worth holding together. It is narrower than the usual sense of the word: it says nothing about disbelief, and, as one Dialogue writer observed, it does not include the traditional meaning of activity aimed at destroying the church. FAIR is right that on its face it targets advocacy rather than inquiry, and Church spokesmen have said so repeatedly: simply asking questions has never constituted apostasy. But the same Handbook instructs that the accused be told the accusation 'in very general terms, such as "apostasy" or "moral conduct unbecoming a member of the Church"' and specifically 'do not give any details or evidence.' There is no provision for anyone to help prepare a defence. The definition is public; its application, by design, is not.34

That is the shape of the unresolvable part. The Church holds that a voluntary religious society may decide who belongs to it, that local leaders decide, and that the reasons are confidential to protect the member. Its critics hold that a definition applied in secret, by leaders who may consult general authorities but whose decisions those authorities do not direct, is a definition that cannot be tested. In the middle sit six people who published in journals the corpus holds in full, and whose books — Women and Authority, The Sanctity of Dissent, New Approaches to the Book of Mormon — it does not.35

Thirty years on, much of what they wrote has been absorbed. The Church's Gospel Topics essays now discuss post-Manifesto plural marriage, Joseph Smith's polygamy, Book of Mormon DNA, and the priesthood ban. The Relief Society's Nauvoo minutes, which Hanks had to reconstruct from archives, are online. Quinn received the Mormon History Association's Leonard J. Arrington Award in 2016, and the Church has cited his work on its finances in its own defence.36 None of that reversed a single council.

Notes

  1. Davis Bitton, 'Ten Years in Camelot: A Personal Memoir,' Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 16:3 (Fall 1983), 9–33; see also D. Michael Quinn, Chosen Path: A Memoir (Signature Books, 2023), 240, 245, on Howard W. Hunter's role in the 1970 decision and on Quinn's own hiring in February 1972 at $3.50 an hour. → source ↩
  2. Bitton, 'Ten Years in Camelot,' opening paragraph. The metaphor is his colleague's, not his own; he attributes it to 'someone.' → source ↩
  3. Bitton, quoted in Jerald and Sandra Tanner, The Mormon Purge (Utah Lighthouse Ministry, 1993), 29: 'the decision was made to scuttle the sixteen-volume history . . . and finally to reassign the remaining historians to a new entity, the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute.' The 1980 administrative transfer and 1982 completion of the move, with restricted archive access, are described in a Journal of Mormon History memorial account of the division, JMH 25:1 (1999), 124. → source ↩
  4. Tanner and Tanner, The Mormon Purge, 27, quoting the 25 January 1982 First Presidency letter and the 8 February 1982 setting apart of G. Homer Durham; Bitton on the portrait gallery, Dialogue 16:3 (Fall 1983), 19. → source ↩
  5. Boyd K. Packer, 'The Mantle Is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect,' address to the Fifth Annual CES Religious Educators' Symposium, 22 August 1981; reprinted BYU Studies 21:3 (Summer 1981), 259–278. The corpus does not hold the address; the passages quoted here are reproduced verbatim on FAIR's topical page and on MormonThink's 'Intellectualism' quotation page, which prints the sequence elliptically. Quoted as reproduced there, not from the printed text. → source ↩
  6. FAIR, 'Mormonism and history/Boyd K. Packer's talk: "The Mantle is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect"' and the associated Sweden fireside page, arguing that Packer addressed CES employees and that a church may properly require its own religion classes to support faith. → source ↩
  7. D. Michael Quinn, 'On Being a Mormon Historian,' lecture to the BYU Student History Association, fall 1981; first published by Modern Microfilm Co. in 1982 without Quinn's permission, and reprinted with additions as 'On Being a Mormon Historian (and Its Aftermath)' in George D. Smith, ed., Faithful History (Signature Books, 1992). Neither the lecture nor Faithful History is held by the corpus; both are documented in FAIR's citations. Because the BYU Studies reprint was available, later citations across Dialogue, BYU Studies and JMH run to the reprint pagination rather than to the 1981 typescript — e.g. Dialogue 39:4, note 14, citing BYU Studies 21 (Summer 1981), 262. → source ↩
  8. On McMurrin's 1954 near-excommunication and McKay's intervention: Dialogue 28:1 (Spring 1995), 6, and Dialogue 55:3 (Fall 2022), 20, quoting McMurrin and L. Jackson Newell, Matters of Conscience, 199–200. → source ↩
  9. Blake Ostler, 'An Interview with Sterling McMurrin,' conducted fall 1981, published in the Seventh East Press 11 January 1983, reprinted in expanded form in Dialogue 17:1 (Spring 1984), 39. The Dialogue editors note that paragraphing and typographical errors were corrected silently and that the order of some questions was adjusted. → source ↩
  10. The Seventh East Press, 8 March 1983, 6, the paper's own account of the 9 February ban, the meeting with BYU public relations director Paul Richards, and the staff's response. The run held by the corpus ends with the April Fools parody issue of 1 April 1983; the paper ceased publication on 12 April. → source ↩
  11. Lavina Fielding Anderson, 'The LDS Intellectual Community and Church Leadership: A Contemporary Chronology,' Dialogue 26:1 (Spring 1993), entry for April 1983, quoting Metcalfe. → source ↩
  12. Tanner and Tanner, Mormonism, Magic and Masonry (1988), 47, and Tracking the White Salamander (1987); Ensign, April 1987, reporting Hofmann's 23 January 1987 guilty plea and the Church's statement that it had acquired forty-eight documents directly from him. FAIR, 'Mark Hofmann' topical page, summarising the forgeries, the Church's purchases, and the resulting tightening of document authentication. The New York Times reporting that prosecutors believed leaders had shelved documents without authenticating them because they were potentially embarrassing is reproduced in the Tanners' Mormonism, Magic and Masonry, 47. → source ↩
  13. Dallin H. Oaks, 'Alternate Voices,' Ensign 19 (May 1989): 27–30, quoted and discussed by Richard D. Poll in his response to Anderson, Dialogue 26:1 (Spring 1993), 83; Sunstone's retrospective judgement is in issue 115–116, 15. → source ↩
  14. 'Statement,' Deseret News, 31 August 1991; reported as 'Church Issues Statement on "Symposia,"' Sunstone 15 (September 1991): 58–59. The March 1992 BYU faculty poll and Sunstone editor Elbert Peck's assessment are in Sunstone issue 123, 42, and in Anderson's chronology, Dialogue 26:1, 45. → source ↩
  15. Benjamin E. Park, 'Mormon Dissent in the Age of Fracture,' Dialogue 56:3 (Fall 2023), 102, for England's words and the AP reporter's exit; Anderson's own recollection of the session, including Leonard Arrington seizing her hand as she came off the stage, is in Sunstone issue 128 (2003), 17. → source ↩
  16. First Presidency statement, issued 13 August 1992, printed Church News, 22 August 1992. The corpus does not hold the Church News; the full text is reproduced on FAIR's Strengthening Church Members Committee page and summarised in Anderson's chronology, Dialogue 26:1, 46. → source ↩
  17. 'Church Defends Keeping Files on Members,' Sunstone issue 88 (August 1992), 64–65, quoting F. Ross Peterson in the Salt Lake Tribune and recording that the committee's executive secretary was William O. Nelson of the Correlation Department's evaluation division, formerly Ezra Taft Benson's personal secretary. → source ↩
  18. Anderson, 'A Contemporary Chronology,' Dialogue 26:1 (Spring 1993), 7 (scan p. 23): 'Both claim supremacy — the supremacy of institutional authority in one case and the supremacy of the individual conscience in the other.' → source ↩
  19. Anderson, 'A Contemporary Chronology,' 8 (scan p. 24). She limits the chronology, she writes, 'to historians and, to a lesser extent, feminists because of my personal identification with those groups.' Levi S. Peterson, 'Lavina Fielding Anderson and the Power of a Church in Exile,' Dialogue 29:4 (Winter 1996), 173, quoting the Mormon Alliance announcement co-signed by Anderson and Janice Allred; the 1993 Dialogue writing awards are listed in Dialogue 27:1, 6. → source ↩
  20. Boyd K. Packer, 'Talk to the All-Church Coordinating Council,' 18 May 1993. The corpus does not hold the address; the passage is reproduced verbatim on MormonThink's 'Intellectualism' page and quoted in FAIR's response to the CES Letter. Quinn's memoir dates it exactly a week after his stake president's letter (Chosen Path, 511). → source ↩
  21. Salt Lake Tribune, 2 October 1993, reproduced in Tanner and Tanner, The Mormon Purge, 5, including Martha Pierce's objection and the composition of the ward council. → source ↩
  22. 'Six Intellectuals Disciplined for Apostasy,' Sunstone issue 92 (November 1993), 67–69, for the vigil, the four denied requests, the cassette transcript and the timing of the council. → source ↩
  23. Sunstone issue 92 (November 1993), 68. FAIR notes separately that Gileadi 'has never spoken publicly about the reasons for his excommunication, was never asked to retract any publications or statements, and has returned to full fellowship.' → source ↩
  24. Quinn, Chosen Path, 507, 511, 516, 537; the 'messenger of unwanted historical evidence' letter and the stake president's 11 May 1993 reply are quoted by FAIR, 'Mormonism and Church discipline/Scholars/D. Michael Quinn.' Quinn's account of the September 1993 councils includes Oaks's remark to Steve Benson, 'You can't stage manage a grizzly bear.' A footnote to that chapter quotes Leonard Arrington's 22 October diary entry: 'We can't see the justice of excommunicating someone who writes honest, sincere, history.' → source ↩
  25. Sunstone issue 92 (November 1993), 69, for Anderson's decision not to attend, her May meeting with stake president Marlin Miller, the 11 September summons, the 24 September letter, and the prayer meeting at the White Chapel. Salt Lake Tribune, 2 October 1993, quoted in The Mormon Purge, 5; the New York Times front page and the NPR segment with Oaks are noted in the editors' introduction to 'Spiritual Paths After September 1993,' Sunstone issue 130 (December 2003), 13. → source ↩
  26. James E. Faust, 'Keeping Covenants and Honoring the Priesthood,' October 1993 general conference, priesthood session. Faust also quotes George Q. Cannon's 1869 distinction between honest difference of opinion and publishing that difference to produce division. The Tribune report of Faust's and Neal A. Maxwell's conference remarks is reproduced in The Mormon Purge, 50. → source ↩
  27. 'Statement by the Council of the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles,' January 1994. The corpus does not hold the original; the full text is reproduced on FAIR's Church-discipline pages. → source ↩
  28. 'Three September Six Appeals Denied,' Sunstone issue 94 (1994), 83, quoting Anderson's stake president's letter and her reply to the Salt Lake Tribune. Whitesides's and Toscano's appeals, which challenged the definition of apostasy, were denied at the same time. → source ↩
  29. Wright's 20 February 1994 letter to his bishop is reproduced in Sunstone issue 96 (1994), 71. Allred's 1995 council and Sunstone's count of eight excommunications since September 1993 are in Sunstone issue 100 (1996), 88. The Barrett and Metcalfe cases are summarised by Richard and Joan Ostling, Mormon America, 358–359, as quoted on MormonThink; the corpus does not hold Mormon America itself, only FAIR's rebuttal compilation of it and MormonThink's quotation of it. → source ↩
  30. 'LDS Scholars Face Discipline,' Sunstone issue 125 (December 2002), 75, and Murphy's own account in Sunstone issue 131 (2004), 60–62; 'Mormon Scholar Disfellowshipped,' Sunstone issue 135 (December 2004), 76. Palmer's account of what he was told he must repudiate comes from a 2012 Mormon Stories interview quoted on FAIR's page for An Insider's View of Mormon Origins. → source ↩
  31. 'Excommunicated Scholar Rebaptized,' Sunstone issue 102 (1996), 75, for Gileadi's February 1996 rebaptism; Maxine Hanks, interviewed in Dialogue 52:1 (Spring 2019), 47; Anderson's 2019 denial and the concerns she raised in her baptismal council are described in FAIR's CES Letter rebuttal, part 65, citing a Salt Lake Tribune report and quoting historian Matthew Bowman. → source ↩
  32. Jana Riess, 'A Question of Authority,' Dialogue 56:3 (Fall 2023), 73. Kelly's bishop's stated grounds are quoted in FAIR's 'Articles of Faith 8: LDS Church Disciplinary Councils' (30 June 2014); Dehlin's 2015 excommunication and the Deseret News report of the decision letter are cited in Dialogue 48:4 (Winter 2015), note 48. → source ↩
  33. Riess, 'A Question of Authority,' Dialogue 56:3, 72, quoting the 1989 General Handbook of Instructions and noting that apostasy had been 'upgraded' from the 1980s formulation about associating with apostate cults. → source ↩
  34. The Handbook's notification language is quoted in Sunstone issue 94 (1994), 32, in an essay comparing LDS disciplinary procedure with the 1637 trial of Anne Hutchinson; the observation that the written definition omits activity aimed at destroying the church is from Dialogue 31:4 (Winter 1998), 145. FAIR's statement that 'simply asking questions has never constituted apostasy' quotes the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve, June 2014. → source ↩
  35. Verified against the corpus manifest and a source lookup: Maxine Hanks, ed., Women and Authority (1992); Paul Toscano, The Sanctity of Dissent (1994); Brent Lee Metcalfe, ed., New Approaches to the Book of Mormon — of these only New Approaches is held. Dialogue (1966–2026) and Sunstone (issues 1–164) are held effectively complete, as are the Seventh East Press and Quinn's Chosen Path. → source ↩
  36. Publisher's epilogue to Quinn, Chosen Path, 549, on the 2016 Arrington Award, the 2017 publication of The Mormon Hierarchy: Wealth and Corporate Power, the Church's citation of his financial work, and the Gospel Topics essays' treatment of subjects he had urged be openly acknowledged; Hanks on the Relief Society minutes going online, Dialogue 50:1 (Spring 2017), 171. → source ↩

Stories from the record

Human-scale episodes inside this topic, each anchored to a source.

The missing portrait

In the east wing of the Church Office Building a corridor holds portraits of the Church historians, beginning with Oliver Cowdery. Davis Bitton, who had been an assistant Church historian, went looking for Leonard Arrington's. 'Nowhere to be seen,' he wrote in 1983. The official explanation was that a Church Historian must be a general authority; in Arrington's place hung Alvin Dyer and Joseph Anderson, whose plaque described them as managing directors, though as the historians knew, before 1972 there had been no managing directors. 'Orwell's Truthspeak did not have to wait for 1984.'

Sources: Ten Years in Camelot: A Personal Memoir · The Mormon Purge

A specialty fast

On the afternoon of 9 February 1983 the news editor of the Seventh East Press was cutting out subscription labels when he noticed a KUTV camera crew in the office and realised something had happened. BYU had withdrawn permission for the paper to be sold on campus. He proposed passive resistance in the form of a hunger strike. Few of the staff had seen Gandhi, and the idea was watered down to a 'specialty fast': they would abstain from pizza until the ban was lifted. He also considered chaining himself to the campus newsstand. The paper folded nine weeks later.

Sources: The Seventh East Press (1981–1983)

Arrington kisses her hand

When Anderson finished reading the chronology at the 1992 Sunstone symposium, a woman in the front row jumped to her feet applauding and the hall followed. Eugene England went first to the microphone and denounced the Strengthening Church Members Committee. At the end of the hour Leonard Arrington rushed the stage; before she could come down the steps to meet him he seized her hand and kissed it. Anderson later judged the paper 'spectacularly unsuccessful' as measured by results: within the year Cecilia Konchar Farr and David Knowlton had been fired from BYU, and within thirteen months she had been excommunicated.

Sources: Sunstone news and retrospectives on the di… · Contemporary Perspectives on the Thirtieth…

Orange juice replaces hot chocolate

At six in the morning on Sunday 19 September 1993 more than a hundred people gathered in the parking lot of the Cottonwood stake centre with candles and hymnbooks while Paul Toscano's disciplinary council sat inside. The candles guttered out as it grew light. People came and went, leaving to attend to their own Church callings. Orange juice replaced the hot chocolate. At half past twelve Toscano came out and spoke to what was left of the crowd; he said the high councilmen had asked hard but fair-minded questions and that he felt they loved him. At three he was excommunicated.

Sources: Six Intellectuals Disciplined for Apostasy…

The son who baptized his father

In February 1996 Avraham Gileadi was rebaptized. His nineteen-year-old son Sam, who had just received a mission call to Argentina, performed the ordinance. Gileadi was confirmed by Leaun Otten, the stake president who had excommunicated him. Gileadi's friends and neighbours were there, and so was the entire group of Church leaders who had participated in the excommunication. 'My baptism was a sweet experience,' he told the Salt Lake Tribune. 'I feel like I'm home again, and it is a good feeling.'

Sources: Sunstone news and retrospectives on the di…

The sacrament, taken twice

Excommunication bars a person from partaking of the sacrament. Anderson went back to her ward the Sunday after her council and has attended ever since, serving where she is permitted — for a period as the Relief Society's permanent substitute organist. Levi Peterson recorded that she told him of a friend who partakes of the sacrament twice each Sunday: once for herself, once for Lavina. 'May we all in some such manner support Lavina in her exile.'

Sources: Lavina Fielding Anderson and the Power of…

Mormon Stories leads

Search phrases for the Mormon Stories transcript database. Episode numbers are deliberately absent — the transcript index was not queried for this build, and a guessed episode number is worse than none.

September Six 1993 excommunication disciplinary council apostasyInterviews with the surviving members of the six and with people who kept the vigils; first-hand accounts of what was said inside the councils.
Lavina Fielding Anderson chronology Mormon Alliance ecclesiastical abuseAnderson describing how she assembled the chronology, what her stake president told her, and why she kept attending church for three decades after being cut off.
Michael Quinn Mormon hierarchy excommunication Boyd K. PackerQuinn's own account of the History Division, the two 1993 councils he never publicised, and his position that he was disciplined as a messenger.
Strengthening Church Members Committee files Eugene England Sunstone 1992Testimony from people who were shown, or refused sight of, a file about themselves in a stake president's office; England's role and its cost.
Grant Palmer Insider's View disciplinary council CES institute directorPalmer's own narration of the December 2004 hearing and of being told he would have to repudiate every chapter of his book to remain a member.
Kate Kelly Ordain Women excommunication 2014 church discipline onlineHow the 2014 and 2015 cases were experienced differently from 1993 because the record was public in real time, and what that changed about the Church's options.

Related topics

Race and the Priesthood 1830–1978 and afterLGBTQ Latter-day Saints 1946–2025The Book of Mormon: Origins, Translation, and Witnesses 1820–1830 (with disputes running to the present)Church Finances, Tithing, and the Transparency Question 1831–2025

People who also appear elsewhere

D. Michael QuinnBoyd K. PackerDallin H. OaksLavina Fielding Anderson