SHE SEEMED TO BE AN IDEAL CHURCHWOMAN, BORN-AND-BRED LDS, daughter of a bishop, Brigham Young University alumna, and youthful missionary volunteer. As an adult, she spent eight years on the church headquarters staff as an associate editor of the official Ensign magazine. In Salt Lake City’s Whittier ward she devoted herself to a variety of the assignments that are open to the ladies, such as Primary teacher and Cub Scout den mother. Lately she had served as the pianist and a home visiting teacher for the Relief Society and as a name extractor with the genealogical program.
She was married for time and eternity in the temple. At home, her family held daily devotions and sang hymns together each night after supper. Her husband was the group leader for high priests in the ward; their teenage son was the president of his Aaronic priesthood quorum. Obeying an admonition from the late church president Ezra Taft Benson, each year she read the Book of Mormon through from cover to cover. Spurning the skeptics, she believes that the Book is “an ancient document” and says, “I hear the voice of God speaking to me through it…. I consider myself to be orthodox in my beliefs. I strongly believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet, and that Gordon B. Hinckley is an inspired prophet. I believe the teachings of the Mormon Church.”
Not good enough.
On September 23, 1993, Lavina Fielding Anderson was excommunicated and has lived ever since in Mormon limbo. By order of her stake president and his advisers, she is no longer a church member and is forbidden to enter the temple, to fill any ward post, to receive the sacrament, or to speak or offer prayers during worship. Her eternal temple “sealings” to her husband and her son have been suspended. It is unclear whether and on what terms she will ever be able to undergo rebaptism and resume her place in the LDS Church. Despite this exile status, she still faithfully—if silently—attends weekly worship and goes to the Sunday school and Relief Society meetings. “I’m in the same place I’ve been in every Sunday morning since I was a baby.”
Anderson is an extremely potent symbol of church discipline because she has been involved with several important latter-day institutions that persist in examining religious questions apart from hierarchical control. Such groups are something new in Mormonism.
Around mid-century the LDS subculture began slowly producing a critical mass of self-conscious and outspoken intellectuals, usually with graduate degrees from secular universities. “The church has often swatted down intellectuals individually,” Anderson commented, but until the 1960s they were few in number and had no platforms for independent thinking. The members of this movement regard themselves as faithful and loyal Mormons rather than as dissidents. And by and large they have pursued their endeavors without becoming entangled in controversies over apostasy or excommunication. Most intellectuals have learned to exercise a certain discretion, but eventually some participants in these autonomous organizations were swept into the most systematic clampdown since the internal strife of the nineteenth century.
Anderson, a freelance writer and editor with an English Ph.D., provided useful skills for Mormonism’s small but significant independent sector. She has edited the semiannual journal of the Mormon History Association, which publishes some troublesome scholarship from LDS, Community of Christ, and non-LDS participants. She has been an associate editor of the scholarly quarterly Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought (founded in 1966). She has written for the feisty Sunstone magazine (founded in 1975) and spoken at its Sunstone Symposium in Salt Lake City (held annually since 1979). She has been a longtime member of the editors’ board for George D. Smith’s Signature Books (1981), which continually publishes quality liberal thinking on controversial LDS topics. She was a leader of the Mormon Women’s Forum (1988), whose annual conferences provided a feminist alternative to official views. And she is active in the Mormon Alliance (1992), which opposes what it regards as arbitrary use of church power.
Anderson coedited three volumes of Case Reports of the Mormon Alliance. Available online at www.mormonalliance.org, the material documents instances of alleged “ecclesiastical abuse,” not only excommunications but such uncomfortable themes as the grievances of homosexual Mormons and the church’s handling and mishandling of sexual abuse cases. Interviewed about the latter problem for a 1999 Houston Chronicle investigation, a church defense lawyer said in the previous decade a maximum of thirty lawsuits had alleged sexual abuse by LDS officials, of which a third were dismissed without damages, and another twelve to fifteen were settled for less than it would have cost to go to trial. The attorney said most problems predated 1995, when the church instituted a telephone hotline and training to help bishops deal with abuse complaints. But Anderson told the paper there are many other cases where suits were not filed and said some Mormons were excommunicated for reporting abuse to bishops. BYU refused to let women professors issue a study of seventy-one LDS women who had suffered childhood abuse; two of the professors quit and published the research in 1999.
Anderson first raised a dissenter’s profile while working at Ensign in June of 1981. The magazine had just gone to press with a toned-down version of a conference talk by a General Authority about the sins of the end times (homosexuality, abortion, birth control, and so on). Sunstone planned to run a comparison between the published version and the actual talk as captured on videotape. Anderson offered to provide Sunstone with the text as the Authority prepared it, prior to the Ensign revisions, and sent a copy to a Sunstone volunteer in the interoffice mail. A supervisor opened the mailing, and Anderson was sacked on the spot for revealing “confidential” information.
Anderson was never informed exactly what her 1993 “apostasy” consisted of. But it was widely assumed that she was punished for delivering a paper at the 1992 Sunstone Symposium, and publishing a version of it in Dialogue in 1993, that compiled data on more than one hundred examples of church repression against intellectuals. After the article came out, church members sent her information on another hundred cases. Rather than being removed for heresy, in other words, Anderson apparently suffered church discipline because she conveyed information on church discipline. Her most incendiary accusation was that headquarters operates a systematic clipping service to monitor individual Saints, carefully filing their letters to the editor, other writings, quotes in the media, and public activities. “We must protest, expose, and work against an internal espionage system that creates and maintains secret files on members of the church,” she has declared.
The First Presidency later admitted that it had established the Strengthening Church Members Committee, led by two apostles, which “serves as a resource to priesthood leaders throughout the world.” The Presidency cited precedent in Joseph Smith’s 1839 scriptural command that Saints document “abuses” against them and collect the “libelous publications that are afloat” (D&C 123). A spokesman said that Salt Lake officialdom merely supplies the data and that local church officials are responsible for any resulting actions taken against members.
No other sizable religion in America monitors its own followers in this way. The files are only one aspect of a meticulous system of internal discipline through which contemporary Mormonism operates more like a small cult than a major denomination. Ecclesiastical censure as such is nothing unusual. Most religions have some form of discipline on the books, usually to deal with moral misconduct. Most religions with creeds act against dissidents from time to time. In recent times there have been some noteworthy theological prosecutions in such U.S. denominations as the Roman Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, the United Methodist Church, and Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (and some noteworthy acquittals in the liberal Episcopal Church). But other denominations usually remove those who are found guilty from their jobs without expelling them from the church altogether. The LDS Church, however, is unusual in penalizing members for merely criticizing officialdom or for publishing truthful—if uncomfortable—information. Also, mainstream churches openly state the charges that are at issue (and Protestants often conduct public tribunals), while Mormon officials shroud their procedures with secrecy. The Mormon Church prosecutes many more of its members than do these other religious groups, which tend to focus discipline on clergy in prominent and exposed positions such as theology professorships. Such discipline of rank-and-file members in other churches is virtually unknown. (Since the church never makes public its reasons for discipline, the information used here is from defendants and observers.)
The system works, achieving its intended goals of defining policy and fostering obedience and caution among the membership. Few Saints have joined Lavina Anderson in raising their voices against the ecclesiastical judiciary, and few are likely to do so in the future now that she has been expelled from Eden. The events of the 1990s have signaled that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will tolerate no deviations from stated policy and no public questioning of the General Authorities. For those cast into exile this is usually a life-changing event more significant than, say, a Baptist joining his wife’s Lutheran church, or even a divorced Catholic joining the Episcopalians. An exiled Saint is in danger of weakening or severing family ties, long-cherished friendships, perhaps even employment. The Mormon communal bond is so unique that exile puts a person’s very identity at stake.
The most noticed of the Mormon defendants were the so-called “September Six.” Anderson and these five other Saints were convicted by local church courts during the same month in 1993:
When the Six faced tribunals, there were several modest public demonstrations. A few Mormons quit the church in protest, among them Scott Kenney, the founding editor of Sunstone, and Steve Benson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist with the Arizona Republic and grandson of the reigning LDS president.
The September Six cases were only part of a broader cleanup. Former Phoenix journalist Deborah Laake was excommunicated prior to the September Six over publication of her memoir Secret Ceremonies: A Mormon Woman’s Intimate Diary of Marriage and Beyond. The book recounted Laake’s three divorces and bouts with mental illness, devoting only seventeen pages to LDS temple rites. Besides violating the sanctity of the temple, she condemned Mormon patriarchy and exposed the faith to what the ecclesiastical court termed “open shame and public ridicule.” The book was panned by non-LDS historian Jan Shipps and Irene Bates of the Mormon Women’s Forum, but it landed on the New York Times best-seller list for fifteen weeks.
Months before, church tribunals had also looked to the right, pursuing a campaign against numerous extremists who preached conspiracy and end times ruination in the wake of Mormon James “Bo” Gritz’s America First presidential campaign. (Gritz drew half his 99,000 votes in the Mormon heartland states of Utah, Idaho, Arizona, and Nevada.)
Three months before the Six were convicted, Brigham Young University had ended the faculty careers of Cecilia Konchar Farr, who publicly favored open abortion laws, and David Knowlton, who gave a Sunstone Symposium speech analyzing the factors behind terrorism against LDS missions in Latin America. Martha Sonntag Bradley, the coeditor of Dialogue, resigned from the history faculty rather than face what she believed would be certain dismissal when she came up for tenure. Following the September Six trial, BYU removed Brian Evenson for his fictional musings and Gail Houston for her Mother-God invocations. And under the new crackdown on faculty members without temple recommends, Steven Epperson was fired for failing to meet demands on church attendance and tithe-paying. Scott Abbott, the faculty’s most outspoken champion of academic freedom, had tenure and would have been difficult to dislodge. Instead, the administration refused to promote him from associate to full professor—not for academic reasons, it pointedly explained, but because of his inadequate “loyalty and citizenship” and his “zeal to change policy at BYU.”
During the two years following the September Six eruption, controversy continued in the church courts with the excommunications of four more notable dissenters:
The Mormon Alliance types draw principles from secular law and complain that the closed-door ecclesiastical courts do not give defendants clear charges to answer; provide no means for an adequate defense; mingle the roles of prosecutor, judge, and juror; violate due process of law; and are otherwise confusing, arbitrary, and unfair.
Mormonism, however, follows its own ecclesiastical law, the General Handbook of Instructions (which most members never see). Eighteen pages are devoted to disciplinary matters and outline five steps of increasing severity that ward or stake leaders can take against members:
The Handbook requires that a disciplinary council be held when there is evidence of “apostasy,” defined as persistently teaching incorrect doctrine, following teachings by apostate sects (especially polygamous ones), or “repeatedly acting in clear, open, and deliberate public opposition to the Church or its leaders.” That last catchall clause is the basis for the recent celebrated cases. Interestingly, “Jack Mormons”—those who are on the membership rolls but are no longer involved in church activities—and Mormons who have left to join other denominations are not automatically classed as apostates.
Despite the church’s turbulent past, disciplinary cases were becoming rare by the mid-twentieth century. For instance, as church president starting in 1951, David O. McKay backed his friend Sterling M. McMurrin of the University of Utah against disciplinary grumblings from apostles who despised his views on such matters as human evolution. McMurrin, later the university provost and U.S. commissioner of education under President Kennedy, never faced an ecclesiastical court even though his heresies overshadowed those of the 1990s defendants.
The independent sector’s most important scholarly periodical is Dialogue. The quarterly originated with a handful of Saints in the Stanford University ward attended by the first managing editors, history professor G. Wesley Johnson and an English doctoral student, Eugene England. Both Johnson and England later ended up teaching at BYU. The Palo Alto group enlisted a board of like-minded colleagues across the country (among them Dallin H. Oaks, later an apostle and no ally of the liberals). The slightly older Mormon History Association, led at the time by Leonard Arrington, fostered the fledgling quarterly and provided papers for an annual history issue in the early years.
“We never thought of Dialogue as a dissident journal,” England said, though others have so defined it. The inaugural issue stated that since the 1950s Saints had been talking about the need for an independent journal and for “open discussion.” The editorial said Mormons in the new generation “share the faith of their elders but also possess a restrained skepticism born of the university, the office, and the laboratory.”
For conservatives, however, “restrained” was hardly the word for Dialogue. From the start it explored fundamental problems in LDS history and theology. In its second year the journal ran a letter from a prominent Mormon, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, assailing the ban on blacks in the priesthood: “My fear is that the very character of Mormonism is being distorted and crippled by adherence to a belief that denies the oneness of mankind. We violate the rights and dignity of our Negro brothers, and for this we bear a measure of guilt; but surely we harm ourselves even more.” Anderson said that during this era perhaps half a dozen Mormons were excommunicated for criticizing the LDS racial doctrine.
In 1973 Dialogue ran an article that was as much a landmark as Anderson’s 1993 blockbuster on repression. In it physician Lester E. Bush Jr. explored the historical basis of the black priesthood prohibition. The staff decided to publish despite a last-minute telephone plea from the academic vice president of BYU to kill the piece because “the Brethren” (top General Authorities) were upset. A decade later headquarters prodded local church leaders to bring in for questioning church members who were writing for independent publications, Bush among them. His stake president, hotel magnate Bill Marriott, told Bush that Apostle Mark Petersen had phoned him personally to complain about the article on blacks.
In 1975, when Scott Kenney was putting the first issue of Sunstone to bed, Apostle Boyd Packer told him he hoped the new magazine would not be like Dialogue and cited Dialogue’s decision to publish the Bush article in defiance of General Authority counsel. (That counsel, of course, did not come from the General Authorities but only secondhand. In fact, Bush said he had discussed the article in person with Packer, and the apostle never raised with him the idea of killing the article, then or later.) As Packer may have feared, Sunstone has turned out to be even more free-spirited than Dialogue, perhaps because it worried less about academic etiquette. And the magazine added a dash of humor, a rare Mormon commodity. Kenney’s original prospectus said the magazine would be “independent of official Church direction, but not of Church teachings.” It would “not be used as a vehicle for dissidents,” nor would it show favor to “any ideological faction or special interest.”
The LDS establishment may feel that those promises have not been kept. Both Sunstone and Dialogue seek to air conservative as well as liberal ideas, but as a practical matter find the task difficult. “We don’t want to be perceived as representing only one side,” said a Dialogue coeditor, Neal Chandler, an English professor at Cleveland State University. “We are open to any contribution. We give all voices a forum.” But, he added, “this kind of discussion is very, very difficult.” For one thing, the independents naturally want to publish material that will not find expression in official outlets. For another, conservative loyalists can be wary of appearing in “liberal” publications. Despite those obstacles, and shoestring financing, Dialogue and Sunstone have become essential reading for today’s well-informed Mormon, left or right, as much so as the official and more cautious Ensign magazine and the weekly Church News supplement in the Deseret News.
Sunstone is more of a lightning rod than Dialogue because it sponsors the liveliest forum on contemporary Mormon issues, the annual Sunstone Symposium. This Salt Lake City talk-fest was started in 1979 by then-editor Peggy Fletcher Stack (now an award-winning religion reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune) in order to cover a broader range of topics than was possible at the Mormon History Association meetings. The magazine has also held regional sessions in places like Washington, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
“There was nothing quite like it previously in LDS circles,” said Elbert Eugene Peck, Sunstone’s editor from 1986 to 2001. The 1998 symposium, for instance, offered a forty-eight-page program stuffed with intriguing topics unlikely to be aired at official church gatherings, such as BYU faculty hiring practices, the Mormons’ missionary competitors in Mexico, the chances that more Saints will become Democrats, the spiritual relevance of the Catholic monk Thomas Merton, Evangelical panelists discussing the question “Are Mormons Christian?”, LDS efforts to stem dropout rates, trends in Mormon consumerism, Mormon divorce, and those old standbys, God the Mother, black priesthood, and polygamy.
Peck said the media pay attention to the symposium and naturally “cover the controversial sessions. There are a lot of faith-affirming things too, but they don’t get the stories.” After the 1991 Sunstone gathering, the First Presidency and the Quorum of Twelve Apostles issued an attack on unnamed “recent symposia” organized and attended by Mormons. Apparently hackles were raised by David Knowlton’s Latin America talk (seen as endangering missionaries), a speech on temple garments by the Gentile scholar Colleen McDannell, and the usual flurry of hierarchy-bashing.
The “symposia” statement said that some matters are “more appropriate for private conferring and correction than for public debate.” Though Saints might want to attend in order to defend the church’s position, the authorities said, sometimes it is better if loyal Mormons do not “promote a program that contains some (though admittedly not all) presentations that result in ridiculing sacred things or injuring The Church of Jesus Christ, detracting from its mission, or jeopardizing the well-being of its members.” A church member who wrote to the Salt Lake Tribune complaining about that statement was advised that he could be disfellowshiped.
At the next General Conference Apostle Boyd K. Packer warned believers against “symposia which concentrate on doctrine and ordinances and measure them by the intellect alone.” He said, “There is safety in learning doctrines in gatherings which are sponsored by proper authorities.”
The decree did not reduce media attention or symposium registration, which still ran around 1,500. But the church leaders did succeed in altering the dynamics. Peck said that “before, there was a large contingent of BYU faculty, maybe seventy, on the program. Now it’s five, if we’re lucky. The attendance hasn’t dropped, but fewer moderate, mainstream Mormons now attend than in the past.” Some ward leaders have explained they can’t participate as long as they are holding office. “So people take sabbaticals from Sunstone.” (Peck himself had been stripped of his temple recommend prior to the “symposia” attack because Sunstone ran a piece repeating what other publications had said regarding changes in temple rituals and reporting on church disciplinary action on the issue. Publisher Daniel Rector lost his temple recommend at the same time.)
The General Handbook of Instructions put into effect in 1999 added a new clause that makes the “recent symposia” statement part of canon law and a potential basis for church discipline. It reads: “The Church warns its members against symposia and other similar gatherings that include presentations that (1) disparage, ridicule, make light of, or are otherwise inappropriate in their treatment of sacred matters or (2) could injure the Church, detract from its mission, or jeopardize its members’ well-being. Members should not allow their position or standing in the Church to be used to promote or imply endorsement of such gatherings.”
Packer, regarded as the hierarchy’s chief theological watchdog, made a highly significant observation in a May 1993 address to a council of top church staff members. He warned that three “dangers,” of an “intensity and seriousness that we have not faced before,” had made “major invasions into the membership of the church.” These were the gay and lesbian movement, the feminist movement, and “the ever-present challenge from the so-called scholars or intellectuals.” So feminism had emerged as a vexation equal to independent intellectualism, a trend underscored by the church’s actions against the likes of Allred, Anderson, Bradley, Hanks, Houston, Laake, Whitesides, and such male sympathizers as Quinn.
President Hinckley admitted that in theory, prayer to the Mother in Heaven or women in the priesthood could be allowed some day through a direct revelation, but he did not expect that to happen. He considered aggrieved feminists to be a minor factor, and as a mathematical matter, he was right: “I think you’ll find our women are very happy now. We have a dissident now and again, somebody who speaks out very sharply, very strongly. But that’s very unusual. Statistically it’s such a very small item that you’d hardly reckon with it…. They’re outspoken. They speak up. They feel strongly about it. That’s their prerogative. They talk about it a good deal, and we’ve heard what they’ve had to say. We’ve heard it again and again. We feel they’re not right. We let them go forward with what they’re doing. If they speak out against the church in a strong, vigorous way, then possibly some action will be taken.”
Action was indeed taken early on against a feminist pioneer, Sonia Johnson. Like Lavina Anderson, Johnson had a conventional upbringing, in her case as the daughter of a teacher in the church’s high school seminary system. While a wife and mother living in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., Johnson joined a loose band of Mormon women who favored passage of the Equal Rights Amendment at a time when the LDS leadership had mobilized against it, with Hinckley playing a central role. The group formed the small “Mormons for ERA” in early 1978, and Johnson was picked as president because she was teaching only part-time and had some free hours. The group marched under a Mormon banner in an ERA parade, and Johnson testified before a U.S. Senate subcommittee, tangling with LDS stalwart Orrin Hatch. Soon she was traveling here and there as a prized advocate of the ERA.
Things started plummeting downhill when a newspaper reported that Johnson told one audience not to let Mormon missionaries into their homes, though her allies had a videotape to disprove that quotation. Then the church’s own Deseret News said that Johnson had denounced “the savage misogyny in the Mormon Church,” whereas she had used that phrase to indict society in general. Late in 1979 Johnson was summoned before a church court on short notice without any charges being specified. She was excommunicated, and the formal notification cited the two disputed quotes. Technically she was not convicted over her ERA stand but for undermining the authorities and programs of the LDS church.
That was a transitional era for Mormon women in other ways. In 1970 the First Presidency issued a directive that ended the financial independence of the Relief Society, the denominational women’s auxiliary. Too much energy was going into fund-raising projects, said the Presidency, so the male priesthood would henceforth take over all money matters, “leaving the sisters free to perform their specially assigned tasks.” The Relief Society was to remain a useful vehicle for humanitarian service, training, and wholesome fellowship. But the women no longer raised their own money, no longer paid dues, and no longer decided to join the organization—all LDS women were enrolled automatically. All Relief Society financial assets were turned over to male priesthood quorums. In the final indignity, the Relief Society was told to stop publishing its own magazine; there would be one magazine for adult Mormons of both sexes. The ubiquitous Correlation Committee also took charge of the women’s educational materials and made the women’s separate midweek sessions less important.
Unlike in other denominations, Mormon men control leadership appointments in the women’s auxiliary. In the regional stakes the male priesthood picks the Relief Society president and has the right to approve her choice of counselors. The same system of priesthood control operates in the local wards. And the women’s national officers serve at the pleasure of male hierarchs. Anderson complained that important decisions by the Relief Society president must get approval up the chain of command to her assigned adviser on the First Quorum of the Seventy, the Presidency of the Seventy, the executive committee of the Twelve, the full Twelve, and then the First Presidency. Though it is not a matter of church law, the authorities discourage women from serving in local Sunday school presidencies, restricting their officeholding to the Relief Society, Primary, and Young Women’s auxiliaries. Since 1963 women have not been allowed to be ward clerks (secretaries), and the church also prefers that assistant clerks be men.
In earlier times Mormon women were allowed to impart blessings to the sick. But in 1946, Apostle (later President) Joseph Fielding Smith wrote the Relief Society that women should anoint only other women, “with the approval of the priesthood,” and, he said, it would be “far better for us to follow the plan the Lord has given us and send for the Elders of the Church to come and administer to the sick and afflicted.” From that point, the formal practice of women blessing other women and children died out. On the other hand, in 1978 the First Presidency and the Twelve ruled that it is permissible for women to pray audibly during Sunday sacrament meetings, and an Ensign article said Relief Society visiting teachers are allowed to offer prayers in private homes. LDS feminists have chafed perhaps most of all over the emphasis on homemaking and mothering at Young Women’s and Relief Society meetings, as opposed to career options, and over the General Authorities’ continual suggestion that a good Mormon woman’s place is in the home, although that message has been moderated lately—perhaps because surveys show that many Mormon mothers now work outside the home.
In 1974 a group of restive Mormon women in the Boston area began publishing a newspaper titled Exponent II, named after a nineteenth-century independent suffragette publication that evolved into the Relief Society’s now-defunct magazine. In Exponent II ’s first issue, its editor, Claudia L. Bushman (Richard’s wife), said the purpose was “to encourage and develop the talents of Mormon women.” The group, which became more militant and later morphed into an online network at www.exponentii.org, remains one of the few outlets for LDS feminist expression. Editor Jenny Atkinson has said, “The church is trying to put in place ways for women to be heard. But in an organization that’s set up hierarchically, that’s hard to [make] happen, especially when men’s and women’s roles are set and ordained by God. Even within the parameters of what Mormons can do, I think there would have to be huge structural changes in order to have true equality in terms of gender.”
Though no explanations were given, some faculty members assumed that Exponent II was the reason that Brigham Young University authorities in 1993 tried to disinvite Bushman as a campus speaker and vetoed an appearance by another Exponent II founder, the historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. Ulrich, who was supposed to address the annual campus women’s conference, is the only LDS woman to have received a MacArthur “genius” grant or the Pulitzer Prize. That same year the BYU board fired Carol Lee Hawkins, who had run the women’s conference for six years. Those incidents were included in a 1996 indictment of the school’s treatment of women, issued by the local chapter of the American Association of University Professors. Other grievances included the veto of a third woman speaker; rejection of five female faculty candidates who had been endorsed by academic administrators; press reports that Professor Marie Cornwall was criticized for including critical as well as laudatory voices in an academic conference on the Relief Society; and refusal to let the two female professors publish their study on Mormon survivors of childhood sexual abuse. The AAUP concluded that BYU “has a history of suppressing scholarship and artistic expressions representing the experience of women.”
In 1996 Exponent II opened a new front in the culture wars, running sympathetic articles on homosexuality and listing resources. Not surprisingly, the issue did not recommend the recent Deseret Book title Born That Way?: A True Story of Overcoming Same-Sex Attraction. (Years before, Sonia Johnson had turned to lesbianism after her husband left her for another woman.) Although Boyd Packer’s triple-threat speech ranked homosexual liberationists alongside intellectualism and feminism, in fact that movement’s presence in Mormonism is minuscule. The only noticeable organization is Affirmation, a “support group for Mormon gay, lesbian, bisexual and dual/transgendered persons” formed in 1979. The organization, with a few hundred members and several local chapters, publishes brochures, manages a Web site, and holds regular conferences.
One Affirmation member, a father of four, made a typical but unusually articulate plea to a church disciplinary council that excommunicated him in April of 1999. He stated that he met his same-sex partner of eleven years after his wife had decided to end their marriage. “I cannot comprehend our Father in Heaven endowing certain of his children with the unique characteristics of a gay person, then rejecting them,” he declared. “There are things about which I do feel guilt, but I feel no guilt for being a gay man. I feel no guilt for sharing my life with my partner.” He predicted that the church would change its policy, just as it had on plural marriage, blacks in the priesthood, and birth control.
The leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints makes no apologies for clamping down on some Saints, though sometimes it apologizes for individual statements. One oft-quoted slogan appeared in a 1945 message to ward teachers in the denominational magazine Improvement Era: “When our leaders speak, the thinking has been done.” When a Unitarian clergyman complained, President George A. Smith replied that the statement embarrassed the General Authorities. But that retraction went to one outsider while the magazine’s instruction to the mass of Mormons was left uncorrected. And in 1979 First Counselor N. Eldon Tanner took to the pages of the denominational magazine to endorse the statement of the Young Women’s president that “when the prophet speaks, the debate is over.” A year later Apostle Ezra Taft Benson presented lavish assertions about the authority of the church president and said the “Living Prophet” is more vital to believers than “dead prophets,” the Mormon scriptures, or the Bible. A heading in the 1982 manual for LDS college students proclaimed, “The Lord Will Never Permit the Living Prophet to Lead the Church Astray.” In 1994 Apostle M. Russell Ballard told BYU students, “We will not lead you astray. We cannot.”
Those are not chance comments, but expressions of a well-defined theology on authority and dissent. Apostle Packer explained the latter-day concept in his important Church Educational System address of 1981. Church history, “if not properly written or properly taught,…may be a faith destroyer,” he said. “The writer or teacher who has an exaggerated loyalty to the theory that everything must be told is laying a foundation for his own judgment…. The Lord made it very clear that some things are to be taught selectively and some things are to be given only to those who are worthy.” With an apparent reference to the solemn oaths of loyalty to church leaders that church members take during the temple endowment, he declared, “There is a limit to the patience of the Lord with respect to those who are under covenant to bless and protect His Church and kingdom upon the earth but do not do it…. We are at war with the adversary. We are not obliged as a church, nor are we as members obliged, to accommodate the enemy in this battle.” Teachers paid by the church have a special responsibility to build faith, he said. “If you do not do that, but in fact accommodate the enemy, who is the destroyer of faith, you become in that sense a traitor to the cause you have made covenants to protect.” Similar admonitions came at the 1985 CES symposium from Apostle Oaks. “Satan can even use truth to promote his purposes. Facts, severed from their context, can convey an erroneous impression,” he said.
At the General Conference just after the 1993 September Six crackdown, Apostle James E. Faust, an attorney, stated that there is no concept of a “loyal opposition” to be found in the church. Each decision by a presiding quorum is unanimous, following private discussion. Similarly, among the membership at large there will be honest differences of opinion, but any questions are to be raised privately with priesthood overseers. “Those men and women who persist in publicly challenging basic doctrines, practices, and establishment of the Church sever themselves from the Spirit of the Lord and forfeit their right to place and influence in the Church…. There is a certain arrogance in thinking that any of us may be more spiritually intelligent, more learned, or more righteous than the Councils called to preside over us.”
That November the First Presidency and the Twelve gave an official interpretation of church discipline in light of the September Six debate. “We have the responsibility to preserve the doctrinal purity of the Church. We are united in this objective.” The Brethren quoted the Handbook on apostasy and, like Faust, distinguished it from mere difference of opinion. “The general and local officers of the Church will continue to do their duty and faithful members will understand.”
The hierarchy’s top fifteen quoted Joseph Smith: “That man who rises up to condemn others, finding fault with the Church, saying that they are out of the way, while he himself is righteous, then know assuredly, that that man is in the high road to apostasy.” They also cited a saying of Jesus during his Book of Mormon ministry among Israelite Native Americans in the New World: “But if he repent not he shall not be numbered among my people, that he may not destroy my people,” referring to III Nephi 18:31, Mosiah 26:36, and Alma 5:59. Joseph Smith’s revelations provide today’s leaders with all the scriptural warrant they need for taking action against troublemakers. Smith and his successor Brigham Young sent numerous close colleagues into exile for their disobedience. From July to November of 1831 alone, Smith uttered four denunciations of the rebellious in the name of God that are part of the LDS scriptures (D&C 1:3, 56:1, 63:2, 64:35).
Yet Joseph Smith Jr. was nothing if not a dissenter in his own time. And dissent has its uses, four of which were listed by Roger D. Launius and Linda Thatcher in their anthology on Mormon dissidents, Differing Visions: Dissenters in Mormon History. Dissent helps distinguish between normative and illegitimate positions, generates solidarity among believers as they rally to punish or save malcontents, lets members “blow off steam,” and provides a useful “warning sign to church leaders that real concerns need to be reconciled.”
BYU’s David J. Cherrington said much the same in an Encyclopedia of Mormonism article that scanned the Mormon History Association, Exponent II, Dialogue, Sunstone, Affirmation, the Women’s Forum, and the rest. “Unofficial organizations and their publications may serve at least six important functions for Church members and/or the Church,” he wrote. They let Mormons exchange ideas with people from different religions. They provide social support for their members. They add to the body of Mormon literature. They give the “opportunity to learn and distribute new insights.” They allow people with unorthodox beliefs to share questions “in an open forum where they feel adequate acceptance.” And they provide a platform for advocacy among “members who feel a need to promote change.” Leonard Arrington observed another sort of benefit: he said the appearance of Dialogue “reinvigorated” its more official and orthodox rival, BYU Studies.
And, it might be added, Mormon dissenters have sometimes been proven right.
But at the turn of the third millennium there was palpable worry and alienation among some of Mormondom’s best and brightest who remained loyal church members in good standing. Reflect on the devastating words of one of Dialogue’s founders, Eugene England, when he spoke at the close of his career at BYU: “I’m pretty pessimistic because it seems like things are just getting narrower and narrower. It’s beginning to affect the students.” He observed “pressures on the faculty for orthodoxy to the point that they’re really afraid to explore questions,” and students who distrust their own teachers and are afraid to read anything that is “culturally incorrect.”
Or hear the poignant pain that came from Armand L. Mauss, a retired professor of sociology at Washington State University: “I have come to feel increasingly marginal to the Mormon community during my adult life, at least in a social and intellectual sense, despite my continuing and conscientious participation in church activity (including leadership) and despite my own deep personal faith in the religion itself.”
For those in charge of any human institution, open debate can be irksome. In a religious institution, especially, uncertainty about belief can bring serious spiritual consequences. But there is always a high price to be paid when certain questions are not to be asked, when certain questioners are not to be welcomed, and when certain leaders are not to be questioned.