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All rights reserved. He visited these homes with his missionary companion and asked the boys if they still wanted to be Mormons. On Sunday with similar church disciplinary actions threatening Mormon feminist Kate Kelly and blogger John Dehlin, Anderson discussed her spiritual journey: What triggered the LDS Church's disciplinary action against you? . In 1961, when Michael Quinn was a devout Mormon of 17, his best friends girlfriend gave him a copy of Family Kingdom, a biography of the one-time apostle John W. Taylor. [5] They moved to Utah in 1991 when she was hired to be the religion writer for The Salt Lake Tribune, where much of her reporting has focused on the LDS Church. Quinn read Hanks letter that night and wrote a detailed response. sltrib.com 1996-2023 The Salt Lake Tribune. A church spokesman told him that it did exist, and the First Presidency issued a formal statement about it the following week. ", "Guilt, pain, help and hope when Mormon missionaries come home early", "For a string of vivid reports revealing the perverse, punitive and cruel treatment given to sexual assault victims at Brigham Young University, one of Utah's most powerful institutions. At first, his timing appeared serendipitous: In 1972, while he was completing a masters in history at the University of Utah, an academic named Leonard Arrington was appointed church historian. "Given who I was, there was no place to go but out," Hanks said in 2003, on the 10th anniversary of the excommunications. In the summer of 1952, the late Sterling McMurrin, an eminent philosopher and writer, met with two LDS apostles to defend his theological views.With complete candor, McMurrin laid out for Elders Joseph Fielding Smith and Harold . 1) I am very proud that, unlike the LDS Church, I have been transparent regarding OSF finances and my own compensation. I had never been treated as a liar before. Peggy Fletcher Stack writes for the Salt Lake Tribune. While LDS leaders can be defensive about media attention, sustained criticism from the outside world seems to have an effect. It really hurt my feelings. I know how to avoid people I didnt want to be in contact with, he says. She embodies, more than anyone else I know, the ideal of a broken heart and contrite spirit, which has influenced me so strongly that I, the last time I checked, was one of only two of the 21 children of the September Six who is still an active member.. By then, Quinn had more or less moved on. He acknowledged to me that, of course, it is possible to find outlets for service outside of Mormonism. In 1975 Stack helped found Sunstone, an independent magazine of Mormon studies, and steered it for its first eleven years. Knowing that our Heavenly Parents are both male and female teaches me that our potential as women is limitless. They dont acquire these positions by filling out an application and sending in a rsum. Something similar, if more protracted, took place after September 1993. It went back to his college years. This was almost certainly wrong: Romney has plenty of LDS critics, most notably Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. There were stretches of time when he was the only deacon, and he and I would exchange glances as he passed the sacrament to our row. Hanks return predated the Ordain Women movement, which pushed for women to join the faiths priesthood, said Latter-day Saint scholar Matthew Bowman, who heads the Mormon studies program at Claremont Graduate University in Southern California. Mormon author Grant H. Palmer has been summoned to an LDS Church disciplinary hearing on Sunday, facing possible excommunication for apostasy. I just feel such heartache that the church I love is doing this to people who are sincere and trying to find ways of being Mormon and express their love of the gospel. The LDS archives became more open to scholars than ever before, and Arrington oversaw research and writing by fellow academics and graduate studentsincluding Quinn, then 28, whom he hired as an assistant. I had a spiritual prompting that summer staying at my cabin that I wasn't to go. Not long before Hofmann sold that forged document, he approached Quinn in the church archives, and asked about the succession crisis and the article. He wrote a short story about two male missionaries in Louisiana who become attracted to each other and are stalked by a religious psychopath. During Quinns New Orleans years, the First Presidency put out a statement discouraging Mormons from participating in academic conferences and other independent forums devoted to the discussion of their faith. Dubbed the September Six, the group were mostly left-leaning writers and scholars who had published articles or given talks about the role of women in Mormonism and the way the churchs leaders handle dissent. We appreciate the search for knowledge and the discussion of gospel subjects, the First Presidency said. Hanks rejoined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in February. For her part, Anderson always has felt a great sense of peace that I made a moral decision, an ethical decision, a decision of integrity and conscience, she wrote. He was troubled by the openness with which materials were being made available to certain individuals other than those authorized, according to Lucile C. Tates admiring 1995 biography, Boyd K. Packer: Watchman on the Tower. Did the Utah Legislature do enough to save the Great Salt Lake? He turned 65 two years later, making him eligible for Social Security and Medicare. It had been a difficult year. Being treated like an ordinary person is a gift a ward can give. [Excommunicated Mormons are not supposed to take communion.] Lavina Fielding Anderson may have been excommunicated from the LDS Church for apostasy more than 20 years ago, but don't think for a minute that this Utah writer is now an outsider to her faith. He asked Quinn to come see him in his office after work one day, Quinn says. If Peggy wanted to do some groundbreaking . It was run by William O. Nelson, he said, once an assistant to Ezra Taft Benson who now reported to Boyd K. Packer. In 1981, Quinn was asked by the colleges chapter of Phi Alpha Theta, a national honor society for history students, to respond to The Mantle Is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect. He did not pull his punches. He left it up to local leaders to come up with a reason. The Salt Lake Tribune . SALT LAKE CITY (RNS) After years of tension between Mormons and gay rights activists -- with political action and theological pronouncements on one . The book opened Quinns teenage eyes to dissent within the highest echelons of LDS leadership, and to the apostles debateand apparent dissemblingabout plural marriage after 1890. When his mother died in 2007, she left him the condo. I moved into recognizing the value and power of a lay priesthood in the body of Christ and Christian community. Since then, only one Avraham Gileadi, an Old Testament scholar who has spent his life researching and . The cabin has no phone access, so I had months [after her initial conversation with the stake president] to think about it. The Bible and the Book of Mormon, which depict flawed, human prophets, are, Quinn said, an absolute refutation of the kind of history Packer advocated. I might have lost my soul, but at least I still have my mind. By: Peggy Fletcher Stack. The institutional churchs position toward its intellectual community has shifted slowly and subtly but in real ways in the past 30 years; it is possible that there is a worry that allowing for her rebaptism would unearth battles the present First Presidency would like to let lie buried and spur a public relitigation of the issue., Secondly, the controversies surrounding Anderson had a great deal to do with feminism in the church and with ecclesiastical dissent, he said. [4], She won the 2004 Cornell Award for 'Excellence in Religion ReportingMid-sized Newspapers' from the Religion Newswriters Association in 2004, an award she also received in 2012, 2017, and 2018. He himself did not even stay in town. (Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) But it also betrayed tensions within the church that may never entirely go away. Quinns mother, on the other hand, was a sixth-generation Mormon: She had an ancestor who converted when the Mormons were still in Nauvoo, Ill., and who is mentioned in Joseph Smiths journals. From an early age, he felt within himself the presence of God, this burning of the spirit, as he says. The former LDS stake president, who oversaw a group of Mormon congregations in Tooele for eight years and worked as an architect on her faith's most sacred spaces, faced, in her mind, an impossible choice: Either return to living as a man or resign her . The symposium's "Pillars of My Faith" session will showcase a similar path, said Mary Ellen Robertson, Sunstone's interim executive director. When something like [my excommunication] blows up, the first casualty is trust and that never comes back. She won the Cornell Award for Excellence in Religion ReportingMid-sized Newspapers from the Religious News Association in 2004, 2012, 2017, 2018, and 2022. Gileadi was not part of the Sunstone and Dialogue circles that the others moved in; he had been writing and teaching popular workshops about biblical and Book of Mormon prophecies, which appear to have been deemed false doctrine by LDS leaders. And he continued to correspond with Paul Hanks, who had written to express his displeasure at seeing his words quoted in the newspaper. Instead, he simply took away Quinns temple recommend. Temples, distinct from regular meetinghouses, are reserved for sacred rituals, and require a recommend, a small card indicating ones worthiness, to enter. Peggy Fletcher-Stack. He subsequently has . While such a calling does not officially confer infallibility on the man who receives itand the general authorities are all malepublicly criticizing the men in these positions is strongly discouraged. Though the letter from the current First Presidency made up of church President Russell M. Nelson and counselors Dallin H. Oaks and Henry B. Eyring offered no explanation for the rejection, Bowman speculates that there may be at least two possible answers history and dissent. By the time Quinn arrived, the program had been disavowed, and many of these baptisms needed to be undone. Same-Sex Dynamics Among Nineteenth-Century Americans: A Mormon Example, published in 1996, argues that same-sex intimacy was much more accepted by early Mormonsincluding Joseph Smiththan it is today. Jay Christian, left, and thousands of other people protest against the passage of Californias Proposition 8 outside the world headquarters of Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in 2008 in Salt Lake City, Utah. A history full of benignly angelic church leaders apparently advocated by Elders Benson and Packer would, he said, border on idolatry.. Elder Packer, he told Quinn, will never get over this.. I could imagine the First Presidency thinking that this is not an episode worth revisiting, Bowman wrote in an email. Then he made copies of his letter and Hanks letter and dropped them off at the offices of Vern Anderson and Peggy Fletcher Stack, a former Sunstone editor who had become a religion reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune. They never gave me one reason. Peggy Fletcher Stack / Salt Lake Tribune: High-ranking Mormon official, who twice spoke in General Conference, is excommunicated Check out Mini-memeorandum for simple mobiles or memeorandum Mobile for modern smartphones. I wrote an article for "Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought" that summarized 133 cases of LDS ecclesiastical abuse, and my pleas to do better to care for the Mormon faithful. All contents 2023 The Slate Group LLC. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted. One of the articles came from an anthology called Women and Authority: Re-Emerging Mormon Feminism, edited by Maxine Hanks, a distant relative of Pauland his uncle Marionand, soon, one of the September Six herself. But 90 percent of the ward has changed since my court. Every morning he worked there was Christmas morning, Quinn says. News. Many people do reside in the borderlands between Mormon and not. Stack is an advisor on religion to the Public Broadcasting Service,[2] and has written two books. . The book he was finishing, which would be published in 1994, was called The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power. That higher-ranking leader, James Paramore, had further instructed West to say that the decision was Wests own, and had not come from above. Sign Up. When he went into his office, the bishop, a man named Tom Andersen, said hed read this article in the L.A. Times, Quinn told me. The Mormon church is organized into congregations called wards; a group of these is called a stake. He moved back to Utah and began receiving mail at his actual address. Quinn was already on the alert for such wrinkles in the churchs history. June 17, 2014 8:59 pm . It was not the last time he helped to excommunicate people, though. The most senior apostle, Howard W. Hunter, also suffered from serious health problems. Packer approved Quinns hiring, but he may have come to regret it five years later. Crucially, much of that project is onlinemore than anything, the Internet has revolutionized the field. The intellectual climate had improved under Oaks, people said. Which has also, it seems, made Michael Quinns singular focus on the unspoken parts of the Mormon past less relevant to younger historians, who operate with more freedom and less pressureand who draw far more interest than their predecessors from the wider world, which has suddenly become fascinated by Mormonism. 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That was my decision. It struck him as an old missionarys trick. Peggy Fletcher. And the Tribune is changing with it. It was the papers second article in two weeks about a series of church courts held across 13 days in September and reported in media outlets across the country. What's it like going to church for two decades as an excommunicated member? Peggy Fletcher Stack is an American journalist, editor, and author. There are other matters that I need to talk with you about that are not related to your historical writings. Part of what I feel is a calling to be there. Caffeinated Version: When they left, they said, "Have a nice day," to which I replied, "You have just assured that I will not.". Right next to Pauls was Lavinas description of her beliefs in Jesus Christ, Mormon founder Joseph Smith, the scriptural text he produced, The Book of Mormon, and the role of prophets. He was the first academic to occupy the post, previously held only by high-ranking LDS leaders, and his appointment signaled a broader effort to reorganize the historians office along professional lines. The most threatening thing about Ordain Women to people in the church is that it is coming from faithful, devout, courageous, wonderful women and that's more threatening than anything could be. The timing of his career, which once appeared serendipitous, now seems almost cruel. I have been doing that for 18 years. [Husband] Paul, Christian [their son] and I sang in the choir that day. The church reports a worldwide membership of 16 million. There have always been dissidents in the Mormon ranksthe religion itself is one particularly dramatic dissent from the rest of Christian traditionbut a new community of Mormon intellectuals had coalesced in the 1960s and 70s. His father was never Mormon: The son of Mexican immigrants, he changed his namethough never legallyfrom Daniel Pea to Donald Quinn, apparently wanting to escape his heritage as well as his poverty. Going to the temple, but I feel that it's more important to have the temple in me than for me to be in the temple. Nowadays, anyone can Google Mormon polygamy and learn more than theyd ever need to know about that practice, about its abandonment, the subsequent fallout, and so on. They were receptive. He said it was apostasy because I believed that general authorities had done something wrong. Two decades ago, Maxine Hanks could not have imagined where her spiritual journey would take her, but she knew this much: She would not likely be walking into the waters of Mormon baptism. (In 1985, an Arizona man filed an $18 million lawsuit against the LDS church for not allowing him to do so. Packers notion that those writing church history should share only those things that are faith-promoting is not just intellectually offensive nowit has become quaint, the relic of a time when information was not so freely available. In 1989, Dallin H. Oaks, the onetime law professor and BYU president who was now an apostle, had given a talk called Alternate Voices at the churchs semiannual General Conference. . When the men from the stake presidency came to his door in February, Quinn was living three blocks from the Salt Lake Temple and the worldwide headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2014, and information in the article may be outdated. Quinns religious status wouldofficially, at leastbe decided by his own stake president, not by the higher-ups in Salt Lake City. He had also just published an article titled The Mormon Succession Crisis of 1844, which detailed the confusion about who should succeed Joseph Smith after his assassination. . Quinn told friends that he did not want anyone to lobby on his behalf. The men at his door were the local stake president and his two counselors, the men responsible for overseeing all the congregations in the area. Dated Oct. 23, 1830, the letter was addressed to an early Mormon convert named W.W. Phelps and signed Martin Harris. Hed better start keeping it to himself. We embedded him as thoroughly in the church as we ourselves had been. Stack has been the lead religion writer for The Salt Lake Tribune since 1991. . Whats more, all Mormons are supposed to have a calling in the church, which makes for a wonderfully participatory religion but also discourages casual membership. Robert Kirby does this also, but much more indirectly. How have the members of your ward treated you? He took a fellowship at the Huntington Library, near his hometown of Pasadena, Calif., and began indexing his enormous collection of notes on old Mormon documents, in preparation for his next book. 9:30AM EDT 8/29/2017 Peggy Fletcher Stack/RNS. [5], The Stacks traveled in Africa for a year,[5] then settled in New York City for five years,[1] where she worked as the editor of the Hastings Center Report while her husband attended film school. How is she still a practicing member after all this exposure to the truth? He then announced that I was not a member in good standing and could not use my temple recommend. All rights reserved. At Sunstone, Hanks described her path back to Mormonism as a heros journey, la Joseph Campbell. Quinns polygamy essay, meanwhile, produced more trouble for him with LDS leaders. Press J to jump to the feed. He was excommunicated in 1911. A beaming Bishop Madrigal said I should expect very soon to get a telephone call scheduling an interview with a general authority, she wrote. The all-male priesthood leaders in his Willow Creek Sandy LDS stake could have excommunicated the 64-year-old author, but chose instead a . The noisy nonsense on-screen felt to Quinn like a rough equivalent of what the church was doing to him. This made some church leaders uneasy. I hate him. ", Hanks is a "genuinely spiritual person and quite insightful, who brings a type of spirituality with her that will resonate with lots of people," he said. Not long after that, the bishop met with Anderson and asked her ever so gently if she would like to discuss reinstatement. He compared Packers treatment of Church leaders to the Roman Catholic doctrine of papal infallibility, which is anathema to Mormons. Lavina Fielding Anderson, who was excommunicated in 1993 as part of the so-called September Six, has had her request for rebaptism into the LDS Church rejected by the faith's governing First Presidency after being approved by her local lay leaders. In an April 1968 talk about military service, he described the restless, unchallenged young people who are repudiating their citizenship responsibilities by avoiding and protesting the draft. If those top leaders did not know where he lived, then they could not assign him to a particular stake, and his church membership could not be threatened. (Benson died in 94, Hunter in 95.) The biggest thing that got me was the excommunication of bill reel segment of the Mormon stories podcast. However, I do not see that eternal equality reflected in the contemporary church.". . She was struck by how frail he appeared, and found herself feeling nothing but compassion and love for a man who had once seemed like an enemy. But he had a caring bishop that first year and decided on his own to serve a mission. See Photos. In the early 90s, when he was living in New Orleans, Quinn, nearing his 50th birthday, tried his hand at fiction, going back to the literature he once studied as an undergraduate. Feb 17. Ironically, this testimony only ever deserted him on his Mormon mission. ``It was like `We're here to support you, Brother Gileadi,' '' he said of the atmosphere at the . Following his excommunication, he finished The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power and turned his attention to another scholarly book with deep personal meaning. (He also, as it happens, officiated at the wedding of my parents.) A diligent historian, meanwhile, will come to see that the truth of the matter is complicated. Gileadi, a Hebrew scholar who got into trouble for unorthodox writings about the biblical Isaiah, was rebaptized within several years. [3][4][5] She was raised as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), with her father traveling and speaking as a member of the stake high council. The September Six were six members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) who were excommunicated or disfellowshipped by the church in September 1993, allegedly for publishing scholarly work against or criticizing church doctrine or leadership. Peggy Fletcher. LDS officials disciplined Anderson and five other Mormon intellectuals in and around the fall of 1993. So she met with local and high Mormon leaders and, after several months, they set a baptismal date. (Quinn is known professionally as D. Michael Quinn; the first name on his birth certificate is Dennis.) This new knowledge sent Quinn to the Journal of Discourses, a 26-volume collection of Mormon sermons. Resolved: Release in which this issue/RFE has been resolved. The stake president said I was "exed" for apostasy but I didn't really fit the handbook definition. Peggy Fletcher Stack Senior religion reporter. The president in 2012, when Hanks was readmitted, was Thomas S. Monson. Some did not know that they were. In 2004, after a series of fellowships and visiting appointments, he was the only finalist for a tenured position at the University of Utah. Would love to hear your stories about her. As the historian Ross Peterson said at the time, Comparing Sunstone and Dialogue folks to people who were shooting Mormons in 1839 Missouri is unfair. Peterson, after speaking about Mormon temple rites in the press, had been shown his own file during a conversation with local church leaders. Today, LDS leaders seem more inclined to recognize, said Wotherspoon, now host of the "Mormon Matters" podcast, "that Zion is made up of people of all types. She said she was really angry at the church, not at me. The same group of local church leaders who participated in Gileadi's excommunication were present at the baptism service. By Peggy Fletcher Stack. According the her Wikipedia page: She is a great-granddaughter of Heber J. Fulton has called Quinn a nothing person.. She has been visited by all her ward and stake leaders since 1993, she said, but this was the first time anyone had ever proposed it. In the spring, he had published LDS Authority and New Plural Marriages, 18901904, the culmination of his interest in post-1890 polygamy, first prompted a quarter-century before by Family Kingdom. He does not have friends in Rancho Cucamonga. (These soon-to-be former Mormons were not required to attend.) Down in Provo, Avraham Gileadi met more quietly with his local leaders. (Quinn attempted to reach this friend through a third party before my piece was finished, but declined to give me his name before speaking to him.) Hundreds of other members joined him at gatherings and in small groups, and thus was born the "remnant movement ," which today touts 1000s of adherents. The Salt Lake Tribune, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) public charity and contributions are tax All rights reserved. Taking the sacrament because it's an exclusion I feel every single week. >Two years after an excommunicated Kate Kelly sought a giant leap, Mormon feminists keep making small steps toward equity . Packers involvement mattered because the Twelve Apostles are considered by devout Mormons to be prophets, seers, and revelators. If they directed the councils, then the excommunications were, essentially, a message from the churchs highest spiritual authorities about what Mormons were allowed to do andpublicly, at leastto say. Grant, a President of the LDS Church and is the granddaughter of United States Senator from Utah Wallace F. Bennett. If you've picked up a copy of the Salt Lake Tribune in the last 26 years, you know Peggy Fletcher Stack's name. Religion Two decades after she was "exed," Utah writer still attends her LDS ward. P The Sunstone Symposium runs July 25-28 at the University of Utah's Olpin Student Union. Some things that are true are not very useful. Its not clear whether Packer read Quinns work before interviewing him, but if he did, it probably would have struck him as less than useful. Dear Reader: When I began this series of essays on leadership, I never anticipated the final installment would chronicle recent events that have triggered the biggest spiritual struggle of my life. Or a great one, if possible: Since childhood, Quinn had been told by his grandmother that someday he would be an apostle of the church. While Packers precise involvement remains a matter of dispute, what little is known hints at his interference.