The End of an Era of Mormon Research

By Sandra Tanner

2023 is shaping up to be a monumental year for Utah Lighthouse Ministry. First, after much prayer, I am announcing my retirement effective March 1, 2023. While my health is good, at 82 I realize my body is getting older and slower. Second, we have sold the property and will be closing the bookstore and selling all of our inventory in February. As we sell the various titles, we will not be restocking them, but we will post our research on our website, utlm.org. Thus we will no longer have a physical office or bookstore as of March 1st. We will be donating all of the Tanner research files to the University of Utah Library, Special Collections Department. The bulk of the ministry’s remaining assets and finances will be divided up among several non-profits, with a portion set aside to maintain the UTLM website.

We send our deepest thanks and appreciation to all our friends who have supported our research over the decades. We couldn’t have done it without you!

Sandra and Jerald Tanner in front of the
Utah Lighthouse Ministry Bookstore

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Lighthouse

Jerald & Sandra Tanner:
Despised and Beloved Critics of Mormonism

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For several years our friend Dr. Ron Huggins has been working on our biography, which has finally been published by Signature Books under the title Lighthouse: Jerald and Sandra Tanner: Despised and Beloved Critics of Mormonism. It is available both directly from Utah Lighthouse Ministry and from the other usual outlets, including Amazon.com.

Dr. Huggins wrote:

I am grateful to the publisher, Signature Books, for granting permission to include an excerpt from the book in this issue of the newsletter. The one we have chosen tells the story of the absurdly comical, cloak-and-dagger attempt on the part of the LDS Church Historian’s Department to refute the Tanners in an anonymously written and clandestinely distributed booklet entitled Jerald and Sandra Tanner’s Distorted View of Mormonism: A Response to Mormonism—Shadow or Reality? (1977). The Church ended up with egg on its face after the Tanners figured out in only a few weeks not only who had written it (the late Mormon historian D. Michael Quinn, 1944–2021) but also where it came from—the LDS Church Historian’s Department. With that introduction, I hope you will enjoy the story of “Dr. Clandestine.”

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Lighthouse
Chapter 12: Dr. Clandestine

Wilfrid Clark, an employee of Salt Lake City’s venerable Sam Weller’s Zion Bookstore, was driving down Redwood Road, a north–south street lined with dilapidated industrial buildings running the length of the city. Locals knew it as something of a rough dividing line between the city’s blue-collar west side and the vast salty wastes to the west. It was December 1977 and there was little hope for a white Christmas. The weather was overcast and dreary, with temperatures stuck in the low 40s.

As he drove, Clark kept his eye out for an address given to him by his boss, Sam Weller. Clark spotted the building, turned off the road in front of a non-descript self-storage company, and began searching. He was hunting for a numbered door that matched the key he held—the key that had mysteriously arrived with instructions in an anonymous letter sent to Weller.

Clark found the door, turned the key, and stepped inside. The light outside revealed the room’s contents: a pile of boxes. The bookseller dutifully loaded them into his vehicle and drove back to Zion Bookstore. They opened the boxes and found 1,800 copies of a booklet, Jerald and Sandra Tanner’s Distorted View of Mormonism: A Response to Mormonism—Shadow or Reality?

The booklet listed Salt Lake City as its printing location and its author as “a Latter-day Saint Historian.” A note on the inside cover stressed that the booklet “has not been copyrighted, so that it can be reproduced and distributed freely by others, if they feel that the contents have value.”

Cover of Dr. Clandestine’s (D. Michael Quinn’s) anonymous pamphlet

Five days before Christmas, the sky cleared and the temperature plummeted to near zero, and Weller put the anonymous booklets on display. It was the same day that, according to one student who witnessed it, LDS Church Historian Leonard J. Arrington was seen distributing copies of the booklet at BYU.¹

Before the New Year, the tract had made its way to other places as well, such as Bloomington, Minnesota, where the mission president gave a copy to Jack Hallman, who read it and then wrote to the Tanners asking if they knew about it.² The mission president would say only that a friend had sent it to him, but refused to identify the friend. Hallman said that, “from what he told me, that ‘friend’ was probably the Church Historian’s Office in Salt Lake.”³

The Tanners were naturally curious to discover who wrote the pamphlet. To find out, they first asked Weller where he sent the payment for the booklets. Weller told them that instead of paying, he was asked to reprint the pamphlet with any profits.⁴ When the Tanners asked to see the original anonymous letter, Weller declined.⁵

No one in the burgeoning Mormon historian community admitted to knowing anything about Jerald and Sandra Tanner’s Distorted View of Mormonism. Arrington claimed he was in the dark until it mysteriously appeared.⁶ However, there had been rumors of a forthcoming response to their work for more than a year. The 1970s were a unique era in Mormon historiography. The once-closed LDS Church archives had become more accessible—not to everyone, and certainly not to Jerald and Sandra Tanner. But certain professional historians and favored graduate students could call at the archives in the east wing of the new Church Office Building on North Temple Street and ask to see documents long inaccessible. It was not a free-for-all; some collections remained restricted, and historians employed by the church had more access than outsiders. But it seemed to represent a positive shift in how the LDS Church approached and handled its history, and more people, especially students, were getting involved. But it was all still very fragile and tenuous.

A senior project by Richard Steven Marshall, a student at the University of Utah, submitted the previous May, inadvertently shed some light on the booklet. Marshall’s paper, “The New Mormon History,” included several interviews with Mormon historians and others (including the Tanners) as part of the project. Marshall interviewed Reed C. Durham Jr., a historian and former director of the University of Utah Institute of Religion:

[Durham] said that due to the large number of letters the Church Historian’s Office is receiving asking for answers to the things the Tanners have published, a certain scholar (name deliberately withheld) was appointed to write a general answer to the Tanners including advice on how to read anti-Mormon literature. This unnamed person solicited the help of Reed Durham on the project. The work is finished but its publication is delayed, according to what Leonard Arrington told Durham, because they cannot decide how or where to publish it. Because the article is an open and honest approach to the problem, although it by no means answers all of the questions raised by the Tanners, it will be published anonymously, to avoid any difficulties which could result were such an article connected with an official Church agency.⁷

Jerald found the possibility of a committee of Mormon scholars shooting at him from the shadows of anonymity under the pretense of a letter written by a single person disconcerting because of the level of deception involved. “Inasmuch as we are being attacked from ambush,” Jerald wrote, “we would like to know if we are up against one individual or a team of well-trained marksmen.”⁸ Jerald used the word ambush to intentionally mirror the words of Mormon historian B. H. Roberts, who had once insisted that engagement in debate “would certainly require that the acceptance of the challenge should be otherwise than from ambush . . . I am entitled to know the name of my opponent that I may judge somewhat of his character and standing.”⁹

Jerald vaguely recalled a conversation he had had a year prior during which he learned about a potential response. He could not remember all the details, including whom he had spoken to, but the name Michael Quinn stood out. Leafing through Quinn’s published works did not prove helpful, but when the Tanners studied his 1973 University of Utah master’s thesis and his 1976 Yale doctoral dissertation, they detected similarities to Jerald and Sandra Tanner’s Distorted View of Mormonism.

The author of the booklet included Latin fallacy phrases such as post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this). Who but Quinn, Jerald reasoned, would employ a phrase like that in a document purporting to be written to a layperson with questions? Quinn, Jerald noticed, had previously used post hoc ergo propter hoc in both his thesis and his dissertation.¹⁰ There were other similarities, such as footnotes containing the same references to the same sources in the same order in the booklet as in the thesis and the dissertation. Quinn’s work and the booklet quoted from a rare anti-Mormon manuscript in the Oliver H. Olney Papers in Yale University’s Beinecke Library where Quinn had worked on his doctorate.

By the time Jerald had finished working through Quinn’s master’s thesis, he felt sure he had enough evidence to get an admission from Quinn that he was the anonymous “Latter-day Saint Historian.” When he called and presented his evidence, Quinn emphatically denied that he had anything to do with the matter. It was this that had caused Jerald to work his way through Quinn’s doctoral dissertation as well, which only further solidified what he suspected.

Jerald finally confirmed the authorship when, digging through a drawer, he found his handwritten notes of the previous year’s conversation when he had first heard that a response was in the works. Quinn’s name had been mentioned. The conversation, according to the notes, had taken place almost a year to the day before the booklet was put on sale at Sam Weller’s Zion Bookstore. The notes, consisting of only a few words and phrases in Jerald’s scrawl, “confirmed that the author was ‘Michael Quin[n],’ that the work was written ‘For [the] Historians Office,’ that it was a ‘50 page paper,’ and that the Church ‘may not publish it.’”¹¹ But it also included the name “David Mayfield” written in a box along with the line “had been done.”¹² (see photo below)

Jerald Tanner’s scrawled notes from a 1976 phone conversation about a rumored response to the Tanners’ research claims.

So Jerald picked up the phone and gave Mayfield a call, but apparently did not identify himself—or, if he did, Mayfield missed it. One of the first things he asked was if Mayfield had seen Quinn’s paper before it came out in the form of a booklet. Mayfield, apparently assuming he was speaking with someone at the LDS Church History Department, admitted that he had. But when he discovered it was Jerald he was talking to, he quickly backed away from his earlier statements. After hanging up, Jerald called Arrington and confronted him with Mayfield’s admission. Arrington recalls his response:

I vehemently denied that this was true, and had a considerable argument with him, completely denying everything. We got into a little bit of a shouting match. I then telephoned Dave, who said that Jerald had telephoned him and asked if he had seen a paper by Mike Quinn which was a response to the Tanners. He said he was “caught off guard,” and did admit he had seen such a paper. Pretty soon, Jerald Tanner telephoned me again and apologized for becoming angry with me for my denial. I re-denied the whole business again. Tanner said he was going to publish the complete story, and no doubt he will publish what he believes to be the true story. But he said he would publish that I denied it. I telephoned Mike Quinn to tell him this.¹³

After a conversation with Mayfield, Arrington told Jerald that Mayfield had said he had made a mistake and had been thinking about a different paper. When subsequently asked about this, Mayfield refused to say one way or the other. When Jerald confronted Quinn with what he now knew, Quinn no longer denied he had been the author, but adopted a neutral position that he would neither affirm nor deny being its author.

In the meantime, Jerald had found the historical scholarship in Quinn’s dissertation to be excellent. “Although Dr. Quinn has almost nothing good to say about us,” Jerald wrote, “we feel that he is probably one of the best historians in the Mormon Church. His dissertation written for Yale University is a masterpiece.”¹⁴ But the quality of scholarship in the booklet was mixed, suggesting to Jerald that other scholars besides Quinn had likely been involved.¹⁵ “Since we do not think it fair to give Michael Quinn all the blame for this pamphlet,” Jerald wrote, “we have decided to christen the ‘author or authors’ as ‘DR. CLANDESTINE.’ ”¹⁶

The Tanners spent nearly half of their Answering Dr. Clandestine unmasking the author. The thing that made Distorted View of Mormonism interesting, after all, was not what it said, but its anonymity and the absurd carnivalesque series of events that accompanied its birth.

The two dueling publications—Clandestine’s on the one side and the Tanners’ on the other—provoked different responses. Chad Flake, director of Special Collections at BYU’s Harold B. Lee Library, understood the Tanners’ frustration. “Here’s a man who’s writing to evaluate the Tanners, yet he doesn’t have enough gumption to put his name on it. The credibility of the pamphlet, as far as I am concerned, is nil.”¹⁷ Non-Mormon historian Lawrence Foster, on the other hand, saw the Tanners’ preoccupation with the anonymous author as thin-skinned: “How could anyone who had unleashed the volume of invective that the Tanners have on the Mormons react with such outrage and seeming surprise to a generally fair, if critical, analysis of their own efforts?”¹⁸

But Foster got it wrong. Far from being motivated primarily by anger, Jerald was also energized by it, excited to engage it. If anything angered Jerald, it wasn’t the response—it was the subterfuge, the anonymity, the cloak and dagger. As Sandra recalls: “He would have been glad to see someone give a serious review of the issues, but why such a cowardly process? We were always in the phone book, put our name and address on everything. If the church was going to put out a rebuttal why not own their defense? It was like the anonymous phone calls we would receive telling us off.”¹⁹

Although convinced that Quinn had written at least a substantial portion of the booklet, the Tanners were left in doubt over the extent of Arrington’s involvement. As it would turn out, Arrington had to have known about the booklet before its release, because he had sent a copy of an earlier draft to a friend along with a cover letter dated September 6, 1977, which eventually came into the Tanners’ hands.²⁰

The Tanners probably didn’t need to write an entire book in response to Distorted View of Mormonism. A newsletter establishing its connection with the Church History Department would have probably sufficed, after which they could have watched the booklet sink under the burden of the problems it had created for itself: It was too honest. “We certainly do not believe that Apostle [Ezra Taft] Benson would approve of the rebuttal,” Jerald and Sandra wrote. “[I]t makes far too many admissions concerning historical problems in the Church.”²¹ Some LDS apostles were in fact at that moment taking steps to rein in Arrington and his department, which they felt had been too secular in their historical writing.²²

In the process of making his case, the anonymous author admitted that Joseph Smith had a violent temper, drank alcohol after revealing the Word of Wisdom, took plural wives before the polygamy revelation, retroactively changed revelations, quoted from the King James Bible in the Book of Mormon, and was tried as a glass looker in 1826. The pamphlet argued that church leaders had the “limitations of all men” and might err in their teaching due to misunderstandings of scripture and history. It acknowledged that the LDS temple endowment may have borrowed from Freemasonry. It chided “many of our writers (including nearly all of our apologist–defenders)” on the ground that they “ignore or even deny the weaknesses, fallibility, and humanity of our prophets and apostles.” The author frankly acknowledged the issues surrounding the First Vision and embarked on a lengthy but idiosyncratic argument in support of its historicity.²³

An anonymous historian refuting the Tanners by not only admitting that many of their criticisms against Smith and the church were true, but also challenging the veracity of the First Vision as recounted in the LDS canon, was not a strategy that was likely to warm the hearts of a majority of LDS Church leaders. Then to have the booklet traced directly to the LDS Church Historical Department within a month of its publication represented a particularly bad bit of luck for Arrington, who was already sensing that his position as Church Historian was becoming increasingly untenable. On the same day Jerald called to confront him over the booklet, Arrington recorded in his diary:

my job as Church Historian is an impossible assignment. Consider the following:

1. The anti-Mormons (Jerald and Sandra Tanner, Michael Marquardt, Wesley Walters, John W. Fitzgerald) seek to use every advantage to get information. If one is truthful and “open,” they destroy me by citing you, by declaring I permitted them access, by tripping me up on inconsistencies. They’re out to injure the Church by injuring me.

2. The highly orthodox, cautious people, such as Elders [Ezra Taft] Benson, [Mark E.] Petersen, and [Boyd K.] Packer, are alert for every misstep; they want to discredit me.

3. [Church employee] Tom Truitt (and also Lauritz Petersen at an earlier stage) is a spy for Elders Benson and Petersen. He reads everything I do or say that he can get his hands on, underlines statements which, out of context, will be objectionable to Elders Benson and Petersen, and sends these on to them. . .

I feel very despondent today, pessimistic about my future, feel that I do not have the support of the brethren, and also that I do not have the support of the fellow historians I have a right to expect support from.²⁴

For years the Tanners had argued that the LDS Church suppressed documents and was squeamish about its past. If it publicly began to look as though things were changing as Arrington and his team produced honest, if sympathetic, LDS history, church leaders privately proved Jerald and Sandra right. In the previous five years, apostles had complained publicly about Arrington and his team’s work. Within a few years, Arrington and his department would be moved to BYU, and the previous open access to the LDS archives would be curtailed.²⁵

Jerald and Sandra Tanner’s Distorted View of Mormonism had strengths and weaknesses in its challenge of the Tanners’ work, but one claim rings especially hollow: that the LDS Church archives functioned as all other professional and academic institutions throughout the world. The Tanners “berate the LDS for Suppression of Records,” the anonymous author said, but other “prestigious manuscript libraries throughout the world . . . have long refused permission to photocopy manuscripts . . . or have restricted the photocopying of manuscripts—but this is not mentioned by the Tanners.”²⁶ The issue, however, was not simply restrictions on photocopying, but access itself. And unlike those other institutions, the LDS Church archives had a track record of restricting materials to control the outcome of historical research.²⁷

One Mormon historian asked the Tanners “not to expose the role of the Historical Department in the[ir] rebuttal lest it cause unsurmountable [sic] problems for Leonard Arrington.”²⁸ The Tanners were convinced, however, that the general authorities would have already seen Richard Steven Marshall’s thesis and that Arrington would have more than enough trouble because of disclosures made in it. Arrington would later describe Marshall’s paper as a “land mine . . . that later exploded.”²⁹ Marshall had been summoned to Mark E. Petersen’s office, questioned, and asked to provide a copy of his paper. Copies were made and subsequently distributed among the Twelve Apostles, and several Mormon scholars suffered the consequences.³⁰ The Tanners felt sure that whatever they published about the booklet could not get Arrington into any more trouble with the church than he already was. Rumors were spreading that Arrington’s days were numbered.

The Tanners published their twenty-two-page edition of Answering Dr. Clandestine in February 1978, less than two months after the booklet appeared. On February 24, Arrington was called into the office of his supervisor, G. Homer Durham, and informed that the First Presidency had decided to bring the Historical Department under its direct control. Apostles Gordon B. Hinckley and Boyd K. Packer would now report to the presidency on the department’s actions. Arrington was also informed that he was no longer the official Church Historian, but would now be called Director of the History Division. Arrington was not to publicize this change in title.³¹

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Footnotes:

1. Jerald and Sandra Tanner, Answering Dr. Clandestine, enlarged ed. (Salt Lake City: Modern Microfilm, 1978), 5. Arrington was the first academically credentialed person to be set apart as official LDS Church Historian. Prior to Arrington, the post was filled by LDS general authorities, as it is today. ↩︎
2. Jack Hallman to Jerald and Sandra Tanner, Jan. 7, 1978, 1, in Tanner and Tanner, Papers. In his letter Hallman says that he had been given the booklet “a little over a week ago.” ↩︎
3. Jack Hallman to Jerald Tanner, Jan. 24, 1977, 1, Tanner and Tanner, Papers. ↩︎
4. Tanner and Tanner, Answering Dr. Clandestine, 2. ↩︎
5. Tanner and Tanner, Answering Dr. Clandestine, 2, and “Ambushing the Tanners,” Salt Lake City Messenger 39 (July 1978): 8. ↩︎
6. Tanner and Tanner, Answering Dr. Clandestine, 4. ↩︎
7. Richard Stephen Marshall, “New Mormon History,” Senior Honors thesis, University of Utah, 1977, 61-62. ↩︎
8. Tanner and Tanner, Answering Dr. Clandestine, 6. ↩︎
9. B.H. Roberts, Defense of the Faith (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1907), 1:328; Tanner and Tanner, Answering Dr. Clandestine, 1. ↩︎
10. D. Michael Quinn, “Organizational Developments and Social Origins of Mormon Hierarchy, 1832-1932: A Prosopographical Study.” Master’s thesis, University of Utah, 1973. ↩︎
11. Tanner and Tanner, Answering Dr. Clandestine, 4; “Ambushing the Tanners,” 9. ↩︎
12. Mayfield was an LDS Church employee who was later director of the Family History Department. The note, still in the Tanners’ papers, says that “someone phoned on Dec. 12, 1976.” ↩︎
13. Leonard J. Arrington, Confessions of a Mormon Historian, The Diaries of Leonard J. Arrington, 1971-1997, edited by Gary James Bergera, 3 vols. (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2018), 2:453-54. ↩︎
14. Tanner and Tanner, Answering Dr. Clandestine, 5. ↩︎
15. But it also may reflect Quinn’s being stronger in some research areas than others. ↩︎
16. Tanner and Tanner, Answering Dr. Clandestine, 6. Quinn identifies himself as the author of the tract in “The Chosen Path of a Conflicted Mormon Historian, 1944-2009.” D. Michael Quinn Papers, WA MSS S-2692, Special Collections, Beinecke Library, Yale University. Cited in Arrington, Confessions of a Mormon Historian, 2:453, n12. ↩︎
17. Flake interview, Jan. 18, 1978, in Bergera, “Dissent in Zion: Jerald and Sandra Tanner,” Unpublished manuscript, 1978, 7. ↩︎
18. Lawrence Foster, “Career Apostate: Reflections on the Works of Jerald and Sandra Tanner,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 17, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 51-52. ↩︎
19. Email to Huggins, Jan. 14, 2020. ↩︎
20. The letter is reproduced in Tanner and Tanner, Answering Dr. Clandestine, 24. Arrington actually knew of the pamphlet and spoke about it more than a year prior to that (Arrington, Confessions of a Mormon Historian, 2:453 n12). ↩︎
21. Tanner and Tanner, Answering Dr. Clandestine, 7. ↩︎
22. Leonard J. Arrington, Adventures of a Church Historian (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 143-56. ↩︎
23. Anonymous, Jerald and Sandra Tanner’s Distorted View of Mormonism: A Response to Mormonism—Shadow or Reality? (Salt Lake City), 29-46. ↩︎
24. Jerald called Arrington on January 14, 1978. Arrington, Confessions of a Mormon Historian, 2:452-53 (Bergera’s brackets). ↩︎
25. Gregory A. Prince, Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2016), 328-71. ↩︎
26. Anonymous, Jerald and Sandra Tanner’s Distorted View, 13. ↩︎
27. Prince, Leonard Arrington, 205. ↩︎
28. Tanner and Tanner, Answering Dr. Clandestine, 43. ↩︎
29. Arrington, Adventures of a Church Historian, 154, without naming Marshall. ↩︎
30. Prince, Leonard Arrington, 298-99. ↩︎
31. Arrington, Confessions of a Mormon Historian, 2:474-81. ↩︎

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