By Jerald and Sandra Tanner

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Dr. Hugh Nibley has published a book entitled, The Myth Makers in which he states that “the whole structure of anti-Mormon scholarship rests on trumped-up evidence . . . it is high time to take a new look at a pack of story-tellers who have been getting away with too much for too long” (The Myth Makers, Foreword).

While this may be true of some anti-Mormon books, the Mormon leaders themselves have been responsible for a great deal of myth-making. For years we have claimed that they changed the history and suppressed important documents; now one of their own members admits that this is the case. Frances Lee Menlove, a Mormon psychologist, wrote the following in an article for Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought:

But the story of Joseph Smith, the early Church, the hegira across the plains, and the consequent establishment of Zion is more than just history. It is the story of God directing His People to a new Dispensation. Perhaps because the history is so fraught with theological significance, it has been smoothed and whittled down, a wrinkle removed here and a sharp edge there. In many ways it has assumed the character of a myth. That these courageous and inspired men shared the shortcomings of all men cannot be seriously doubted. That the Saints were not perfect nor their leaders without error is evident to anyone who cares to read the original records of the Church. But the myths and the Myth-Making persist. Striking evidence for this is found in the fact that currently one of the most successful anti-Mormon proselyting techniques is merely to bring to light obscure or suppressed historical documents. Reading these historical documents arouses a considerable amount of incredulity, concern, and disenchantment among Mormons under the spell of this mythological view of history. That individuals find these bits and pieces of history so shocking and faith-shattering is at once the meat of fundamentalistic heresies and an indictment of the quasi-suppression of historical reality which propagates the one-sided view of Mormon history.

The relevance of this to honesty is obvious. The net result of mythologizing our history is that the hard truth is concealed. It is deception to select only congenial facts or to twist their meaning so that error becomes wisdom, or to pretend that the Church exists now and has existed in a vacuum, uninfluenced by cultural values, passing fashions, and political ideologies.

There are other temptations to public dishonesty in the Church, temptations to use pretense and distortion to forward the work of the Church. This is the dishonesty of the missionary who presents only those facts or arguments which tend to support his purpose or who takes a scripture out of context or distorts its meaning a little to add to the evidence marshalled for the point he is making. Invoking a higher law or greater truth can also be a form of dishonesty. This occurs when someone’s views are suppressed or historical manuscripts censored, not because they are false but because they might cause dissension or disturb the faithful or imperil unity.

. . . Another motive behind some kinds of public dishonesty is the belief that the naked truth would be harmful to the simple believer. The assumption here is simply that the believer remains better off with his delusion intact, that faith suffers when it bumps into reality. The reasoning of those who distort or suppress reality or alter historical manuscripts to protect the delusions of the simple believer is similar to that of the man who murders a child to protect him from a violent world. (Dialogue, “The Challenge of Honesty,” Spring 1966, pages 49-50)

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