From the Denver Post...
The Historian's Dilemma
From : "Utah: The Church State" published in the Denver Post Nov 21 - 28 1982
The auditorium at the University of Utah's behavioral science building was packed last February when James Clayton, PhD., dean of the graduate school and prominent Mormon historian, rose to speak.
It isn't an easy time for Mormon historians, he told the crowd.
A dearly loved and respected scholar, "the most significant Mormon historian" in 80 years - Leonard J. Arrington - had been fired by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from his post as official church historian.
Important archives of the church had been closed to all research, Clayton said, and "many projects of considerable worth are now stymied or will be finished with incomplete sources."
Plans for a 16-volume history of the church, nurtured by Arrington, had been scrapped by the Mormon hierarchy. The Mormon historical department had been moved to the campus of Brigham Young University - 40 miles from the church archives that were essential for scholarly work.
The climate for intellectual freedom was clearly at a low point in Mormon history - especially when it came to the kind of critical inquiry that professional historian bring to their work.
Referring to Galileo's 17th century squiggle over scholarly freedom with a Roman Catholic inquisition, Clayton said that "in our own time and in our own community, this age-old controversy continues - only now the tension continues - only now the tension is not so much between faith and science as between faith and history.
"Selecting only those topics, events, and doctrines from history that are comfortable and safe in order to lead the membership more easily into the promised land is, to put it bluntly, intellectually dishonest and morally irresponsible," Clayton said.
Through Clayton did not mention them, those in the audience knew of other attempts made by high church authorities to muzzle Mormon historian.
Two volumes on church history - a one-volume history of the church and a book on early Mormon economic cooperation - were not reprinted after their contents offended members of the Latter-day Saint hierarchy, especially the Apostle Ezra Taft Benson.
One volume had barely been saved from the shredder after the authors failed to give proper credit to a "miracle" in which seagulls descended on a swarm of locusts to save the early Mormon settlers. Neither book will be used for references or in footnotes in future church histories.
And during the previous year, Apostle Boyd Packer and BYU political science professor Louis Midgley had publicly chastised the Mormon historians for not using their work to promote their faith.
It was a problem as old as their religion for the Mormons. Ever since Joseph Smith told his tale of golden plates and ancient civilizations, people have been building his reputation up, or tearing his memory down.
It is quite possible that, in Midgley's words, "there is no middle ground." But if anyone tries to walk the shore- It's the Mormon historians.
Unlike Judaism or Christianity, whose roots are safely sheltered by the passage of time, the Mormon religion is barely more than 150 years old.
Each blemish discovered in the story Joseph Smith and his Latter-day Saints is usually well documented by letters, diaries, or other 19th century records. A trained historian can't shut his eyes to such evidence.
It would be easier if the church were willing to treat such suspect Mormon volumes as the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham as parables, but the hierarchy - mostly businessmen with no concern for the intellectuals' dilemma - won't back down.
"The Mormon position has always been to argue that on the decisive question of the veracity of Joseph's prophetic revelations there are only two alternatives; He was either a genuine prophet, or a base fraud," says Midgely.
And so the Mormon historian is a troubled person, Midglely says, forced to choose between giving up faith or forfeiting professional ethics.
"To treat the Book of Mormon as merely an indication of Joseph's state of mind, or as a document that he somehow crafted out of contemporary materials when one writes as a historian, and then to treat it as a genuine ancient text and a divine revelation on Sunday is a clear case of intellectual schizophrenia," as Midgely put it.
During the Arrington years, the historians tried to gently nudge the church away from its insistence on literal interpretation. Their effort was called "The New Mormon History" but it ended when the church authorities launched their attack. "The discordance between those roles (of faithful saint and honest historian) has produced more than a little self-deception, some blatant hypocrisy (and) some pretentious bad history," Midgely said.
"Facts should not only be taught as facts; they should be taught to increase one's faith in the gospel, to build testimony," Benson told a gathering Mormon seminary teachers in 1976.
Some things that are true are not very useful," added Packer in August 1981.
Mormon historian Davis Bitton says the church has used some subtle but effective means of behind-the-scenes repression as well. He said last August that church officials have selectively limited the material in the archives to just trusted "safe" historians.
Notes are examined by church officials as students and professors conduct their research. Honest historians find that publication has been discouraged - with a chilling intellectual effect - when the church-owned Deseret bookstores, Utah's largest chain, passed the word down the grapevine that they would not carry certain works.
The historians counterattacked - with Clayton's speech, and with a defense of intellectual freedom the previous August by D. Michael Quinn professor history at Brigham Young University, who warned that "the Mormon history of benignly angelic church leaders apparently advocated by Elders Benson and Packer would border on idolatry."
The confrontation has simmered since then. "It will never leave us," says University of Utah history professor Sterling McMurrin, one of the leading Mormon intellectuals.
Page Modified: September 29, 2004