Jerald and Sandra Tanner
In the Spring 1989 issue of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought an unusual article by Samuel W. Taylor appears under the title, “If I Were Satan.” On page 116, the following is found:
As Satan, I would also encourage Church officials to ignore all attacks on the Church, such as the dedicated campaign of Jerald and Sandra Tanner of the Utah Lighthouse Ministry. I would simply pooh-pooh their violently unfriendly book, Mormonism, Shadow or Reality, issued in Salt Lake, together with the condensed version, The Changing World of Mormonism, published in New York [Chicago]. What do we care that the combined sales have been more than 50,000 copies? What does it matter that missionaries are hit with hard questions from readers of these books and are unprepared to answer?
[Bold in quotations is added for emphasis and does not appear in originals.]
It is ironic that this statement would appear in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. This journal has never reviewed either of the two books mentioned by Samuel Taylor! Even Lawrence Foster, a critic who feels we are “narrowminded” and “unethical,” observed the following:
Despite the Tanners’ extensive publication record and the hostility that they have aroused over the past two decades, to date virtually no serious public analyses of their work have appeared. When the Tanners’ arguments have been attacked in Mormon publications, as has occurred on many occasions, their names and titles of their writings have almost never been cited. Indeed, until very recently even independent Mormon scholarly journals such as DIALOGUE and Sunstone, which discuss all manner of controversial issues, have largely avoided mentioning the Tanners by name, much less analyzing their work explicitly. (Dialogue, Summer 1984, p. 48)
In a footnote on page 49, Professor Foster wrote:
In a letter to me . . . Lester Bush explained why DIALOGUE ultimately decided not to review the Tanners’ books Mormonism—Shadow or Reality? and The Changing World of Mormonism despite their hope to make such a review: “We simply had no desire to be drawn into a sensational debate based on fragmentary data and in no way governed by any notion of intellectual responsibility.”
Nothing has changed since 1984, and it seems doubtful that Dialogue will publish any review of our new book, Major Problems of Mormonism. However this may be, we have already sold over 500 copies. One ministry has ordered 150 copies and has sold almost two-thirds of these already!
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