The Sacred, the Profane, and Mormon History

The history of Mormonism is a field white unto scholarly harvest: massive archival holdings, poignant stories of prophets and pioneers, and fresh angles for the discussion of race, gender, capitalism, and a host of other topics in American history. Mormonism is an inexhaustible gold mine for researchers, theorists of religion, and narrative writers. Best of all, Latter-day Saints themselves have an insatiable appetite for their own history. No wonder university presses are releasing an unprecedented number of titles on all things Mormon.

Mormon history is also sacred terrain. Nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints saw themselves as having stepped back into the flow of biblical history, building anew a holy city akin to Enoch's, reliving the exodus of the ancient Israelites, and experiencing persecution like God's saints of old. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has devoted enormous amounts of money and human capital to chronicling, preserving, and presenting its history, and the Community of Christ (formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) also maintains significant historical sites and archival collections.

For most of Mormon history, it would have been inconceivable for outsiders or ordinary church members to gain anything approaching open access to the wealth of documents maintained by the church (which, like any private organization, is under no obligation to allow the curious to look through its papers). That eventually changed, however. For a time in the 1970s, Church Historian Leonard Arrington encouraged both church members and non-Mormons to make much fuller use of the church's remarkable archival holdings. There was a flowering of scholarship. Some historians later looked back on this unusual period of openness as the "Camelot" of Mormon history.¹ At roughly the same time, the church also allowed nonmembers fuller access to its even vaster genealogical holdings.²

All too soon, though, Camelot was no more. High-ranking members of the church hierarchy grew worried about the secular tone and analysis that characterized what had become known as the New Mormon History. In a 1981 address at Brigham Young University, Apostle Boyd K. Packer warned Mormon historians that "there is no such thing as an accurate, objective history of the Church without consideration of the spiritual powers that attend this work." Furthermore, he suggested that faithful Mormon historians ought to keep certain discoveries to themselves because "some things that are true are not very useful." Such things, Packer cautioned, "are to be taught selectively."³ In 1982 the church transferred Leonard Arrington to BYU and released him

From John Hyde, Mormonism: Its Leaders and Designs (New York, 1857).

from his calling as Church Historian. Going forward, the church tightened access—for church members and others—to archival sources. Nevertheless, some Mormon scholars continued to publish material that examined controversial aspects of the church's past, including Joseph Smith's involvement in folk magic and the sanctioning of plural marriages after the church's official abandonment of the practice in 1890. Eventually, these scholars faced severe ecclesiastical consequences for their refusal to disavow such work. The 1993 excommunication of five Mormon intellectuals (including the historian and former BYU professor D. Michael Quinn) and the disfel-lowshiping of a sixth cemented a sense of alienation and distrust between academic historians and the church.⁴

The excommunications hardly burnished the reputation of a church increasingly concerned with its image in the eyes of other Americans. Moreover, the reduced access to archival sources, and the pressure on faithful Mormon historians to produce faith-promoting histories, hindered a fuller and more frank examination of the Latter-day Saint past, something desired by many church members and scholars alike.

Fortunately, the early years of the 21st century brought about a noteworthy détente between academic historians and the church hierarchy. The 2006 publication of Richard Bushman's Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling signaled that a new era had indeed arrived.⁵ Bushman, who once called for believing historians not to shelve their faith as they wrote history, announced his belief in Joseph Smith as a prophet in the preface to his...