by Jon Krakauer
In an essay titled “The Empire of Clean,” Timothy Egan, a reporter for the New York Times, observed,
In the Beehive State of Utah, nearly every town, church, and family of any standing keeps a record, a daily diary of the Mormon Dream. Typically, it is a ledger of life on two levels—one long on struggle and triumph, the story of the creation of Zion in the American West, the other more spiritual but no less detailed. They know in Orderville exactly who was hungry in 1912 and who committed adultery in 1956, but they also know whether somebody's ancestor from the fifteenth century has been given a valid passport to eternal life. Every wagon train drama, every horrific entry from the epic, killing mistake of the handcart migration, every basketball championship over the Indian kids in Carbon County, is written down, somewhere. No state has more keepers of history, or better archives, honeycombed in climate-controlled vaults, than Utah. . . . Mormons have made a workaday craftsmanship of keeping the past alive. There is a record, the Saints like to say, of everything.
I availed myself of this rich history by draining my bank account in bookstores near and far. I also made several visits to the archives of the Utah State Historical Society in Salt Lake City, and the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University, in Provo. During my reading, I was struck by the impact three writers, in particular, have made on the interpretation of Mormon history: Fawn Brodie, the author of No Man Knows My History; Juanita Brooks, the author of The Mountain Meadows Massacre; and D. Michael Quinn, the author of Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power, and The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power.
Each of these historians was born into the Mormon Church, and their faith (or loss thereof, in Brodie's case) informed and enhanced their scholarship, which is distinguished by its courageous, unflinching honesty. Brodie died in 1981, and Brooks in 1989, but Quinn, currently fifty-eight years old, is still a productive scholar at the height of his intellectual powers. Quinn's writing lacks the eloquence of Brodie's and the unembellished narrative force of Brooks's, and as a consequence his books have not been widely read by the general public. The influence of his prodigious work, however, has been huge among Mormon historians. And no writer since Fawn Brodie has provoked such intense condemnation from the LDS General Authorities.
Quinn studied as an undergraduate at BYU, went on to receive a doctorate from Yale, and then returned to BYU as an inspired professor of history. He first aroused the ire of LDS leaders in 1981, when he presented a now-famous lecture to the BYU Student History Association. Titled “On Being a Mormon Historian,” it was a response to a recent attack on those academics, like Quinn, who dared to publish work that was critical of the church's official, extensively expurgated version of Mormon history. “The tragic reality,” he declared in his lecture, “is that there have been occasions when Church leaders, teachers, and writers have not told the truth they knew about difficulties of the Mormon past, but have offered to the Saints instead a mixture of platitudes, half-truths, omissions, and plausible denials.”
Quinn argued, “A so-called ‘faith-promoting' Church history which conceals controversies and difficulties of the Mormon past actually undermines the faith of Latter-day Saints who eventually learn about the problems from other sources. One of the most painful demonstrations of that fact has been the continued spread of unauthorized polygamy among the Latter-day Saints during the last seventy-five years, despite the concerted efforts of Church leaders to stop it.” Quinn pointed out that after officially renouncing the doctrine of plural marriage in 1890, the highest leaders in fact continued to sanction polygamy, covertly, for many years. And this casuistry, he insisted, has driven many Mormons into the embrace of fundamentalism.
“The central argument of the enemies of the LDS Church,” Quinn said, “is historical, and if we seek to build the Kingdom of God by ignoring or denying the problem areas of our past, we are leaving the Saints unprotected. As one who has received death threats from anti-Mormons because they perceive me as an enemy historian, it is discouraging to be regarded as subversive by men I sustain as prophets, seers, and revelators.”
The text of Quinn's lecture, which resonated strongly among Mormon intellectuals, was printed on the front page of an underground student newspaper, infuriating the LDS General Authorities in Salt Lake City and sparking a raging controversy that made the pages of Newsweek magazine. It was the beginning of Quinn's fall from grace in the church he loved. By 1988 he was pressured into resigning his tenured professorship at BYU. And in 1993, following a highly publicized hearing by an LDS “disciplinary council,” he became one of six prominent Mormon scholars who were excommunicated from the LDS Church for apostasy. “The church wanted to send a very public message to dissidents,” Quinn says. “Their goal was intimidation, to silence dissent.”
Banishment from the church came as a harsh blow. “Even if you have all kinds of objections to church policies,” he explains, “when you're a believing Mormon, to be excommunicated is like a form of death. It's like attending your own funeral. You feel the loss of that sense of community. I miss it deeply.”
Quinn's standing in the LDS Church was not helped by the fact that in the mid-1980s he revealed that he is gay; the Mormon General Authorities continue to make the church a very difficult place for homosexuals. Despite Mormonism's entrenched homophobia, and Quinn's unsparing, clear-eyed assessment of Mormonism's faults, his faith in the religion of Joseph Smith remains undiminished. “I'm a radical believer,” he says, “but I'm still a believer.” He seems to be one of those rare spiritual thinkers, as Annie Dillard puts it, who possess “a sort of anaerobic capacity to batten and thrive on paradox.”
“At a very early age,” Quinn acknowledges, “I developed what I call ‘a complex testimony.' Instead of a black/white view of Mormonism, I have an Old Testament sort of faith. The writers of the Old Testament presented the prophets as very human vessels, warts and all. Yet God still chose them to be His leaders on earth. That's how I see Mormonism: It is not a perfect church. It has huge flaws, in both the institution and the people who lead it. They are only human. And I have no trouble accepting that. It's all part of my faith.
“On the very first page of The Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith wrote that if it contained mistakes or faults, ‘it be the mistakes of men.' And this same thing is stated in various ways throughout the text that follows—that errors in this sacred book are possible, even likely. I have always believed that Mormonism was the one true church, but I don't think it has ever been infallible. And I certainly don't believe it has a monopoly on the truth.”
One of the events that led to Dr. Quinn's excommunication was the publication, in 1987, of Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, a fascinating, exhaustively researched examination of Joseph Smith's involvement in mysticism and the occult. In the preface to a revised 1998 edition of the book, Quinn astutely observed that “many academics feel embarrassed for a scholar who even briefly acknowledges belief in the metaphysical.” He argued, nevertheless, that authors had an intellectual and ethical responsibility “to state one's own frame of reference when writing about the metaphysical”—which he proceeded to do, succinctly describing his Mormon faith. And regarding that faith, he wrote, “I make no apologies to secular humanists or religious polemicists.”
I happen to find Quinn's argument compelling. He's convinced me that those who write about religion owe it to their readers to come clean about their own theological frame of reference. So here's mine:
I don't know what God is, or what God had in mind when the universe was set in motion. In fact, I don't know if God even exists, although I confess that I sometimes find myself praying in times of great fear, or despair, or astonishment at a display of unexpected beauty.
There are some ten thousand extant religious sects—each with its own cosmology, each with its own answer for the meaning of life and death. Most assert that the other 9,999 not only have it completely wrong but are instruments of evil, besides. None of
the ten thousand has yet persuaded me to make the requisite leap of faith. In the absence of conviction, I've come to terms with the fact that uncertainty is an inescapable corollary of life. An abundance of mystery is simply part of the bargain—which doesn't strike me as something to lament. Accepting the essential inscrutability of existence, in any case, is surely preferable to its opposite: capitulating to the tyranny of intransigent belief.
And if I remain in the dark about our purpose here, and the meaning of eternity, I have nevertheless arrived at an understanding of a few more modest truths: Most of us fear death. Most of us yearn to comprehend how we got here, and why—which is to say, most of us ache to know the love of our creator. And we will no doubt feel that ache, most of us, for as long as we happen to be alive.
JON KRAKAUER
JANUARY 2003
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