Introduction and Opening Music

Part 1 of 3 · Ep. 285

Guest [00:00:00] 1, 2, 3. Come, come, ye saints. No toil nor labor fear but with joy wend your way though hard to you this journey may appear Grace shall be as your day.

Guest 2 [00:00:30] Welco.

John Dehlin [00:00:31] Thank you for coming. We're here today to honor someone we love, Dean Michael Quinn, and thank him for his contributions in our lives and to Mormon history and the great example that he set for us. I'd also like to mention some people who've helped us get this together. First of all, thank you to Sunstone for paying for Michael's travel here. And Mary Ellen is in the audience today if you'd like to catch her. And thanks. Go out right there in the back. Thanks.

Guest 2 [00:01:02] Go out to.

John Dehlin [00:01:09] To Benchmark Books for helping us bring many of you here. Hopefully they have some books back here to sell and 10% of the proceeds will go to Michael himself. So find a nice title. More than anything, though, we want to thank our donors.

John Dehlin [00:01:25] It's because of the donations that we receive that we were able to put on special events like this. All of our regional conferences, keep our podcasts going. We've got some sponsored projects that are coming up, and so it's the donors who've taken that time to go to MormonStories.org and click those buttons and just make a small donation that really keep us alive. So thank you. Thank you very much.

Upcoming Conferences and Event Announcements

John Dehlin [00:01:50] Speaking of conferences, we have three conferences coming up in Atlanta between the 26th and 28th of August. There will be the Southeast Regional Conference, and they are meeting at a resort, Callaway Gardens. Sounds like it's going to be fun, kayaking, all sorts of exciting things. Then we have the D.C. regional conference will be between October 14th and 16th, I believe, and it will be held at Greg Prince's home, and he will be our keynote speaker.

John Dehlin [00:02:17] And then we have a new kind of conference coming up. We're having an LGBTQ conference, and that will be here in Salt Lake City October, November 4th through 6th. Excuse me. And that will be held just right down the street at the First Baptist Church. And Carolyn Pearson will be coming. We've got a great agenda lined up, so you won't want to miss that. We expect to have a very good time.

John Dehlin [00:02:46] At the Salt Lake Conference. This past June, we read a first draft of our Mormon Stories) Shared Value statement, and we wrote it in hopes of clearly articulating all of the values that we agree upon or try to agree upon, considering how much we. We tend to disagree about, especially online as we're debating and discussing these issues that are important to us. And we received a lot of feedback for the shared Value statement and we were able to update it. So now I have a second official draft to read to you today, but again I'd like to accentuate that this is just a draft. It is open for discussion and we will be hopefully hearing more and revising again.

John Dehlin [00:03:26] Number one we claim the right to self identify as Mormons. If we so choose, we may claim this identity based upon our genealogies, upbringings, beliefs, relationships and other life experiences. 2. We believe that one can be Mormon or claim a Mormon identity without necessarily adhering to the teachings or doctrines of any religious organization.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [00:03:46] 3.

John Dehlin [00:03:47] We acknowledge the richness of Mormon heritage, teachings and community in all of its diversity. 4. We seek spaces where we as Mormons can live lives of intellectual and spiritual integrity, individual conscience and personal dignity. We acknowledge and honor different spiritual paths and modes of religious or non religious truth seeking. We respect the convictions of those who subscribe to ideas and beliefs that differ from our own. Number six we recognize the confusion, distress, emotional trauma and social ostracism that people on faith journeys often experience. We seek constructive ways of helping and supporting people regardless of their ultimate decisions regarding church affiliation or activity. And number seven, we infirm the inherent and equal worth of all human beings.

John Dehlin [00:04:29] We seek spaces where Mormons and all people can interact as equals, regardless of race, gender or sexual orientation. In this spirit of egalitarianism, we prefer non authoritarian and non hierarchical means of organization and affiliation. We're going to begin today with a musical number by Kevin Jacobson. Kevin is a non LDS gay Christian songwriter who composed this piece for his LDS friends after a particularly discouraging conference talk was given not too long ago. The song is entitled Hold On.

Guest [00:05:08] In the darkness of the night

Guest 2 [00:05:12] you

Guest [00:05:13] feel so all alone and you wonder if anyone else could feel this way Unworthy of God's love at least what you've been told but he is waiting for you and reaching out his hand hold on, He will carry you hold on his love is for you too no matter what they say no matter what they do hold on to Jesus he's holding on to you. There are prophets and preachers that throw around the name of Christ and they wonder why anyone would choose to live this way but you are his creation and he loves you as you are he is waiting for you and reaching out his hand hold on. He will carry you hold on

D. Michael Quinn [00:07:10] his

Guest [00:07:11] love is for you too no matter what they say no matter what they do hold on to Jesus he's holding on to you hold on. He will carry you hold on

D. Michael Quinn [00:07:44] his

Guest [00:07:45] love is for you too no matter what they say no matter what they do hold on to Jesus he's holding on to you no matter what they say no matter what they do hold on to Jesus he's holding on to you.

Guest 2 [00:08:50] Dear God, our eternal heavenly parents, we're grateful to gather here in this beautiful place of worship with the large windows and the natural light that enters in. And we pray for Thy spirit to be with us this evening as we get the opportunity to listen to someone of Michael Quinn, who is done a great service to all of us and especially the Mormon community in. Unraveling and articulating our stories. And we look forward to hearing his story as a Mormon historian this evening. And we're grateful for those who have made this evening possible, Ann and John and Mary Ellen and many others who helped organize this. And we pray that as we each

D. Michael Quinn [00:10:10] go on our

Guest 2 [00:10:13] own journeys of faith and spirituality, that we will maintain and strengthen all the relationships in our life, our friendships and our relations with our families. And we pray for Thy guidance in all that we do. In Jesus name, Amen.

John Dehlin [00:10:44] Thank you, Kevin and Rebecca. Michael Quinn is a man who has made his own indelible mark on Mormon history. In my mind, his painstakingly thorough research and well written presentations affect current open Mormon thought more than many of us probably realize.

Overview of Quinn's Scholarly Contributions

John Dehlin [00:11:08] In his possibly most influential works, Early Mormonism in the Magic World View, the Mormon Hierarchy, Origins of Powers, Power, Excuse Me, and the Mormon Hierarchy Extension to Power, Quinn candidly presents us with a well written synthesis of the fascinating primary source material. Much of the history he unveils centers around issues that we 21st century open Mormons grapple with on the Internet on a daily basis.

John Dehlin [00:11:33] Quinn is both demanding and respectful of his readers. The history he so candidly presents requires that we attempt to put aside our own biases and delve into history for its own sake. He challenges us to let go of unreasonable ideals of infallibility. He asks us to explore with him both the inspirational and the embarrassing and regrettable parts of our history and more. His writings, somehow, perhaps unwittingly, I don't know, seem to challenge us, to allow ourselves to confront the uncomfortable and to incorporate any new insights we might then gain into our personal senses of morality.

John Dehlin [00:12:07] I think Quinn expects a lot of us because he respects us. Instead of babying us by working to make history palatable to our modern worldviews, he allows it to speak for itself. It's a beautiful thing, I think to when you're reading a book, to know that that's that you're important to the author and you're going to get it straight.

John Dehlin [00:12:27] Quinn was hired by Leonard Arrington during the so called camelot years between 1972 and 1982, and with a fairly ferocious tenacity, he kept right on Truckin in his quest to present Mormon history with frankness after the decade was over. In addition to the three works I mentioned above, he authored and later revised a notable biography on J. Reuben Clark, a thought provoking book on same sex dynamics among 19th century Americans using Mormons as an example, and a book of collected essays on the topic of new Mormon history. He has also published several articles on Mormon history and one of the most influentials being a detailed analysis of post manifesto polygamy.

John Dehlin [00:13:04] He retired from his teaching position at BYU in 1988 and was excommunicated as one of the either famous or infamous, depending on your perspective September 6th in 1993. More recently, he's been barred from teaching positions and speaking engagements, presumably according to Daniel Goldman of the Wall Street Journal, because funders will not support him.

John Dehlin [00:13:23] It's no wonder then, considering all that. In 2003, at a SEN conference, Quinn quoted from Tennyson's Ulysses, a passage that accurately reflects his resolute approach to research, history and speaking his personal truth. The quote to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Thanks for being here, Michael. And thanks for having guts. Come on up, Michael and John.

Quinn's Early Life and Mormon Faith

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [00:13:52] All right. Well Michael, thank you so much for being willing to come on Mormon Stories).

D. Michael Quinn [00:14:00] Glad to.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [00:14:02] You've been the number one guest that I've hoped to get on the show for many, many years, and I'm just honored to be able to have you here. And I'm also very grateful for all of you who'd be willing to come. We've never done a live Mormon Stories) podcast interview, so Michael, if you want, you can just ignore the fact that all these people are here and pretend

D. Michael Quinn [00:14:28] that it's I'll pretend you're my students, which is nice. I always loved having a room full of students.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [00:14:35] That's great. I've asked many of you to submit questions, so I've tried to pull together many of the questions from your submissions. We will try and leave a little time at the end for a few of you to ask some questions of Michael. And then what I think is going to be the most important part of this whole event is giving each of you guys a chance. Not each of you, a few of you a chance to share with Michael maybe what his work has meant to a few of you to maybe give back to him and thank him for what he's given us. And I also want to thank all of you for your generous donations, which we will make sure Michael shares and benefits from. So. Excellent.

Guest [00:15:21] Well,

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [00:15:23] let's get going with the interview.

D. Michael Quinn [00:15:25] Okay.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [00:15:26] So, Michael, the way we always begin Mormon stories is just to ask people a little bit about their background, kind of their upbringing, as it relates to kind of their story and their life's work. I know that the number one question that I receive on your behalf and that I have, you know, is the following. You know, is Michael Quinn still a believer in, you know, the restoration? And, you know, how can he maintain that belief? And I don't know if that's changed since the last time you've done some interviews, but I get a pretty clear sense that the testimony that you've had, at least traditionally and maybe still have, is rooted in your childhood.

D. Michael Quinn [00:16:14] Yeah.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [00:16:14] So let's start with kind of a little bit about your childhood in the church and some of the experiences you've had that led to your desire to study history and your convictions.

D. Michael Quinn [00:16:27] Well, I had a mixed background. My mother was a sixth generation Mormon and not from a prominent family, but I a family that converted in Tennessee and then moved to Nauvoo in 1843. My father was Roman Catholic and he was a Mexican, but denied being Mexican. And that is a very fundamental part of my issue with probing the past, because I began doing genealogy research against his explicit desires, because I wanted to find out about my ancestry, even if he didn't want me to find out about it. And that determination carried over into my research on Mormon history. And so there's a parallel there, incidentally.

D. Michael Quinn [00:17:25] My father's name was not Quinn when he was born. It was Pena, which stone in Spanish? Pena with a tilde over the m. And he grew up in the Los Angeles barrio with Anthony Quinn, the actor, and was so close to him that he changed his name to Quinn. Never legally, but just adopted the name Quinn. So I was the first one born with the name Quinn. In my family, I grew up with, my primary awareness of family is being divorced. My parents divorced when I was 4 and religion was a part of that issue.

D. Michael Quinn [00:18:09] And I was raised in a Mormon home because my mother was very Mormon and my grandparents, her parents, were the ones who jointly raised me until I was 11 and she remarried and was going to move to Arizona. And I said, I'm not moving with you and I'm going to stay with my grandparents. And so I stopped living with my mother at that time, which is an indication, perhaps regretfully. But I have an iron will, and I was 11 when I made that decision. Decision.

D. Michael Quinn [00:18:47] And it, for better or worse, is a characteristic throughout my life that if I decide I want to do something, I will do it. If I decide I don't want to do something I don't. I had, from my earliest memories a very intense relationship with God.

D. Michael Quinn [00:19:09] And I prayed to God as though he were my father. And as I look at it back from the perspective of psychology or just of the distance of age, I can see that in many ways God the Father became my substitute father. And the intensity of that relationship was something that I didn't have in my life, but that I did have with God.

D. Michael Quinn [00:19:39] And it was very easy for me to talk with God in prayer. And when I prayed publicly, I carried that over into my public prayers, which for me were just another manifestation of my private relationship with God. And for me, it was a physical relationship in the sense that before I had ever read the Doctrine and Covenants about the burning in the bosom or heard that, that was something I experienced. It was for me a tactile, real experience of God's presence, which I later understood was the Holy Ghost. But for me, it was God's presence.

D. Michael Quinn [00:20:23] And I knew that and have known that since I was a child. And. And that's been my primary revelatory experience with God, is feeling that primarily it's been a message of comfort that I've known God was there, that he was real, that he loved me, and that I was important to him.

D. Michael Quinn [00:20:54] Sometimes it has been what I have understood as revelatory, but most of the time it's been just a comfort of knowing that God was there for me. And that hasn't changed. My excommunication didn't change that. Baptism can't give you a relationship with God. Excommunication can't take it away. That's something that's separate, that each individual must work out with God.

D. Michael Quinn [00:21:20] And for me, it's still a very real thing. In terms of my formal testimony of the restoration of Joseph Smith of the Book of Mormon, I'm pretty conservative. I believe in gold plates. I believe in an angel Moroni.

D. Michael Quinn [00:21:41] I believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God, but not exclusive. Brigham Young himself said that people throughout the world and many cultures have prophets, and they're true prophets, and they have revelations, and they're true revelations. But Brigham said, joseph is our prophet for us, and his revelations are for us. And that's how I feel. I don't believe Mormonism has any monopoly on truth. I don't believe that Mormonism has exclusive truth. When I was a teenager, I was studying Baha' I and Islam and Buddhism as well as many of Christian denominations. And my view was. What I'd understood was the view of the church was that we were supposed to embrace truth from whatever source.

D. Michael Quinn [00:22:32] And that was my attitude then. It continues to be my attitude even though in many ways I would regard myself as a fundamental believer, a conservative believer in the essentials of Mormonism.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [00:22:48] Doesn't D&C one kind of make the claim that it's kind of the one and only true church and that all others are inferior, to put it nicely, or lesser? And doesn't just the implications of priesthood and authority kind of leave you to have to conclude as a traditional believer that we are superior and that others are lesser?

D. Michael Quinn [00:23:13] I don't know when I developed this particular attitude toward the church, but it may have been a talk that Hubie Brown gave in our ward. His son was a member of our ward, a professor at usc, and I was the same age of his grandson, Charlie.

D. Michael Quinn [00:23:33] And in the talk that Hubie Brown gave, he said that when we go to other people as missionaries, we sometimes try to tear down their religion in order to give them Mormonism. But he said what we should do is tell them, and the missionaries should say, keep all the truth you have. We just have more truth. And if you'll listen to us, I think you will agree with us. And that's been my approach, that Mormonism is the true church in the sense that it has truths that other religions, other churches don't have, but it doesn't have exclusive truth. And I can learn from Buddhism, I can learn from Baha', I, I can even learn from Jehovah's Witnesses, even though I don't subscribe to many of their very literal interpretations of the Bible.

D. Michael Quinn [00:24:29] Nonetheless, I believe that the message of Joseph Smith in the 13th article of faith and the message of the Mormonism I understand is that it is not exclusive. It is the true church in the sense that it has an abundance of truths to share, but not that it has all truth. The most truth I don't know that most applies because we know very little about the afterlife. Mormons talk very often among themselves as though they know everything and we know very little, but we know essential things about the afterlife. And it could be that a good Buddhist knows more than we do, or that I do, but I think that all of us as humans do what Paul wrote.

D. Michael Quinn [00:25:19] And that is we see through a glass darkly. We don't perceive more than shadows in a Platonic sense of the truth. And the ultimate goal is for us to continue growing from truth to truth, from understanding to understanding, until ultimate. Ultimately, we gain all truth, if that can be done. But I also believe in a progressive God, which was what Gene England, my great mentor in Mormon liberalism, believed in. So we may never come to the point where we understand all truth, where we instead are always progressing from knowledge to knowledge and truth to truth.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [00:26:02] It sounds a lot like Gordon B. Hinckley's testimony to Larry King, which is kind of mind blowing to hear a testimony from you that reminds me of one of our prophets, which. I'm just saying that, you know, there's. Some would find that ironic. I think it's beautiful. But we'll return to your testimony later. Let's talk about a few of the experiences that you've referred to that kind of solidified for you, that maybe you took as signs something about your health, something about a trip into some caves that kind of. Well, I don't know if you call them as signs or things that really affirmed that solidified your testimony.

Childhood, Polio, and Formative Experiences

D. Michael Quinn [00:26:40] Well, shortly after my parents divorced, I was one of the many children in the United States who got polio in a major epidemic that swept periodically throughout the United States. And I ended up collapsing at home. And I remember this, and as my parents were, or my grandparents rather, were rushing me to the doctor first, who said, go to the county hospital immediately.

D. Michael Quinn [00:27:13] As they were doing that, I insisted that they stop and go to an old member of the ward who was in his 60s. I'm older now than he was then, but he was old to me. And as a four year old, I wanted him to give me a blessing. And I don't know really where that came from. My grandparents were surprised that I asked for it, but I insisted that he give me a priesthood blessing. And in the blessing he gave me, he said that he rebuked the illness and said that I would leave the hospital in a few weeks and that I would have no residual effects from the disease.

D. Michael Quinn [00:27:55] I don't know if he knew at that point that it was polio, but it was polio. And it was the fatal kind, bulbar polio, which is inflammation of the. Of the brain. Brain stem. I was in the hospital for about a month, three weeks or so.

D. Michael Quinn [00:28:16] And the boy in the bed next to me was in this large room of children in these metal beds that were the standard back then. He died. And I remember the nurses coming in and bundling him up and taking his body away.

D. Michael Quinn [00:28:35] And yet I had terrible memories and continue to remember those spinal taps that I had and the hot packs and the Sister Kinney approach of hot packs and muscle massage. But I left the hospital after a few weeks and I had no residual effects of that.

D. Michael Quinn [00:29:01] And I have never been able to understand why that blessing was fulfilled in my life. And yet I had friends who had polio and also had blessings of priesthood and of faith. And they had a more difficult time.

D. Michael Quinn [00:29:20] Most of them had. Damage to their muscles because of the polio. And I don't understand, understand why that is the case. I regard in many ways the interventions of God as inscrutable. I'm grateful for the interventions. I'm grateful for the blessings that God has given me. And I have no understanding of why others have not been so blessed. But I can only be grateful. And I always pray. When I do pray. I can't claim to pray every day, but I vocalize my prayers often.

D. Michael Quinn [00:30:05] And when I do, I usually start with about 10 or 15 minutes of thank yous. I have a very real, continue to have a very real relationship with God. And I feel that spirit and presence with me now. I have felt it in non spiritual, quote, unquote experiences, whether I'm watching TV or watching a Hollywood movie. And I love both and have since I was a kid.

D. Michael Quinn [00:30:31] For me, the spirit is not, quote, a religious experience. It's a experience of a relationship. And that can remain, whether you're at the beach or in a movie theater, wherever. The other experience I had, that was, for me, it was. Was a dramatic one occurred when I was nine. And my family, my grandparents, frequently took me to Idaho on the summers. And we would typically go up the California coastline into Oregon and then cut across to Idaho to visit my grandmother's side of the family.

D. Michael Quinn [00:31:15] And that usually was routine summer trip. Well, this time, this particular trip we went to. And I've never been able to remember what they were called. I've always called them the Oregon Caves. But there were some subterranean caves that had the selectites from the dripping of the water in the ceiling.

D. Michael Quinn [00:31:38] And as is typical Anderson in these kinds of guided tours, the tour guide turned off the lights for a demonstration of total darkness. And at that point I had been separated from the group. I'd been just kind of looking at my own pace at things that interested me. And so I started to catch up as he was continuing to talk to the crowd. I went in the direction that I thought they were. His voice was coming from.

D. Michael Quinn [00:32:07] And I had taken a few steps, and I felt and heard. And I can only describe it as one experience that I felt and heard a voice that said, stop. And I thought it was an echo from his voice. And so I hesitated and then continued walking. And then it came very dramatically, very emphatically, stop.

D. Michael Quinn [00:32:31] And. And I stopped. And when the lights came back on, I had been going away from the crowd, and it was the echo and the effect of the echoes in the dark, and I was just a foot or two from a sheer drop into a precipice of some sort in the caves.

D. Michael Quinn [00:32:52] And as a child, I always bore my testimony, and. And I have remained with that testimony to this day that God's voice protected me from death. Now, again, as an older person, seeing people of my acquaintance dying, reading about them in the newspapers, missionaries dying in mission fields, I don't understand why that was my experience, but. But I have never doubted that that was God's voice.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [00:33:27] Why not? And here's why I'll ask that question. And this is a bit ironic, both because I've had it happen to me, and maybe you've had people say this has happened to you, but when you discuss church history in a candid way, people who listen and learn about what you might say or write find often their worldview shattered. And when their worldview is shattered, they think back to the pillars of their faith, which is often, you know, spiritual experiences like the ones you described. And it's really common for people to just decide to kind of reinterpret them, to say, well, I thought I heard a voice, but that could have been instinct or, you know, Darwinism evolved me to have a sense to know what was coming on or, you know, those feelings that I got, or that that polio miracle that happened to me was just kind of good medical care or a robust set of genes that differentiated you or whatever the explanation might be.

Spiritual Experiences and Staying in the Church

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [00:34:29] And it's pretty easy for people to just sort of reinterpret and then sometimes dismiss what they used to think were spiritual experiences. And you of all people, might have had cause to feel pressure to go that way. And there's probably a lot of people here or who are listening who are thinking, what the heck? You know, Michael Quinn, like, I read his stuff, and now I don't have. My worldview's been shattered, yet he's still saying he's a literal true believer and hasn't reinterpreted all the things that I've reinterpreted. And so did you never even reach a point where you considered that?

D. Michael Quinn [00:35:09] Not because of history. I became an atheist for a brief time on my mission, but I grew out of it. But the reason for it had nothing to do with history. I was 20 year old, President of a branch that had collapsed into apostasy. Where in England, a stake it was formed later in that area.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [00:35:35] What year was this?

D. Michael Quinn [00:35:35] It was 1963. No, 64. I was 1964 in the summer.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [00:35:42] So this is after Woodbury?

D. Michael Quinn [00:35:44] Yes, it was after. It was the cleanup of the baseball baptism period.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [00:35:48] Was Hanks there at the time? In Holland?

D. Michael Quinn [00:35:50] I had served under President Hanks for seven months, but he had left in the spring, shortly before I was appointed as the presiding elder of this branch. But as a part of the cleanup for all of the abuses of the baseball baptism period, our resident apostle, Mark E. Peterson, instituted a program of excommunication for those who chose not to remain in the church. And many of them had not even known they were entering a church.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [00:36:23] Describe real quick what baseball bat businesses were. Just.

D. Michael Quinn [00:36:26] It was a youth program, an outreach program that had been established first in the British mission under the leadership of a man named Woodbury. President Woodbury. I don't think he thought of it himself. It was local missionaries, full time missionaries, who thought of the idea of using baseball to draw children to boys primarily, but also girls, into an interest in the church.

D. Michael Quinn [00:36:56] And in theory, that was fine. I mean, any approach, whether it's preaching eternal marriage or many different approaches, can interest people in the church. The problem was that many of these kids were interested only in the sport and not in learning about Mormonism. And so the missionaries said, well, to continue playing with us, you have to attend church.

D. Michael Quinn [00:37:25] And so they grumbled and they went along with that. And then because so much pressure was being put on missionaries to baptize, the missionaries said, well, now you're going to have to go through an initiation. And they took them to the YMCA and dunked them under the water and said they were being initiated into a baseball team.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [00:37:44] And didn't they have like a thousand baptisms a month?

D. Michael Quinn [00:37:47] Huge, huge numbers, Huge numbers. And so there were many children who were baptized. Missionaries sometimes forged their birth dates on their baptismal certificates. I interviewed boys who were baptized at the age of six and many interviewed that thought they were joining a baseball club or a sports club and had no idea they were. They thought it was sponsored by the church, but they had no idea that they were becoming members of the church. Well, anyway, because of these various abuses, President Peterson initiated the program of first doing a survey of all the inactives, thousands, tens of thousands of inactives, who by 1964 may have been teenagers, but that was the most they were. All the boys I interviewed were teenagers and had been baptized anywhere from the age of 6 to 10. Some were baptized as teenagers, most weren't. And if they didn't want to remain members of the church, then we were to excommunicate.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [00:38:59] Well, that's because that was the only way to get them off the record, right?

D. Michael Quinn [00:39:02] There was no option at that point in the general handbook for voluntary withdrawal. And so as a 20 year old, I was in the process. First I have interviewed all these boys and then I was in the process of holding formal excommunication courts for them. And as I think about what happened within me internally, I think it was easier for me to believe that none of it mattered than that everything mattered.

D. Michael Quinn [00:39:31] And that to think that the church wasn't true, that there was no priesthood, there might not even be a God, than to think all of this had happened and that I was participating in this process of excommunicating these boys from God's true church. So anyway, for a period time of, of time, while I was preparing these courts, I had become an atheist. And so I remembered all these experiences and far more than I've mentioned very clearly. But that memory of them did not alter the fact that I had to pray. Oh God, if there is a God and you are God, let me know it again.

D. Michael Quinn [00:40:17] And that was a prayer I was offering every day as a missionary. This period lasted only two weeks. And being an atheist only two weeks is probably not a record, but it wasn't a very long period. But I had decided that if I wasn't able to regain faith that I was going to ask to be sent home from, from my mission and probably leave the church.

D. Michael Quinn [00:40:48] So the stakes were high for me. I could not just play a game. And so as it turned out, faith returned and the spirit of God returned and I renewed my convictions and all of the things that I had believed. But for the first time in my life, I knew what it was like to feel abject disbelief, which I had felt for that two week period while I was conducting meetings and being the spiritual leader of this branch of six people, active people who were attending and depending on me as the branch president or presiding elder. That was an awful situation and one that I could not have allowed to endure very long.

D. Michael Quinn [00:41:40] So I have come to the position of disbelief. I have for that brief period been an absolute doubter, but it had nothing to do with history. And I found when I read things before I went on the mission, I was burrowing into the special collections at byu, reading about the Danites in Missouri and Blood Atonement and all of this stuff. And when I was, prior to going on my mission, I just prayed for the Lord's spirit to be with me, to reassure me of what was true and to help me sort out what was true and what was false and what needed to be understood to a greater degree.

D. Michael Quinn [00:42:26] And I just have a quirky sense of humor. Before I went to the temple, I read all the anti Mormon exposes so I would understand what was going on in the temple beyond what I had been told in official ways. And I. And with that preparation, I regarded the temple ceremony in its entirety as moving, as spiritual. And, and because I'd read the anti Mormon approach, there was nothing there that was disturbing to me. It's not something I would recommend to anybody else, but it was part of my quirky testimony and way of negotiating my membership and faith in the church.

D. Michael Quinn [00:43:09] So I can't say that I've ever had a trial of faith connected with church history. I have found things that disturbed me, things that I didn't understand. And I first brought them up when I was 17. Adam God, plural marriage after the manifesto to Legrand Richards, who was also a frequent visitor in our ward because his daughter was married to our bishop.

D. Michael Quinn [00:43:32] And we were trapped. He was trapped with me and my questions on New Year's Eve when it was on Sunday and we, we couldn't go to our regular New Year's Eve dance. And so we had this meeting in his son in law's home. And he bore his testimony about being a missionary in Holland and mission president in Holland and then a mission president in the Southern states. And then after he'd spoken for about half an hour, he asked for questions that we might have.

D. Michael Quinn [00:44:01] And he didn't know what he was in for because I asked about Adam God and I asked about plural marriage after the manifesto, both of which I learned about that summer before. So I felt that the issues that I was coming across in church history needed to be explored.

D. Michael Quinn [00:44:24] And his answers to my questions I found very reasonable. About Adam God. He said as an apostle, there were many things that he did not understand about that Brigham Young had preached, and he just put them on the shelf. And he said, one day when I am able to meet Brigham, I'm going to ask him about these things and what he meant and what I should understand about them. And I thought that was a very faithful, very honest way to approach the question of Adam God. And when I asked him about plural marriage after the manifestation, he said, well, that he had asked his father about it, who had replaced John W.

D. Michael Quinn [00:45:04] Taylor in the 12 when John W. Taylor was released. And his father, George F. Richards, said that John W. Taylor was a very proud man. And I'd read the family biography and that pride came through. I mean, it was clear to me that his father was a proud man and didn't like being treated the way he was was being treated. And so that simple answer, that pride was the basic reason for people who continued practicing polygamy, that satisfied me until few years later when I found out that that wasn't the explanation, but it was a sincere one on the part of Legrand Richards. And although I set that one aside as not being sufficient, his response to Adam God, I think is a great response that there are things we don't understand and rather than let them eat at us, why not put them on the shelf?

D. Michael Quinn [00:45:59] And in a Greek sense, the term is withhold judgment. Why not withhold judgment about something that we don't understand or know enough about? And so I do that with a lot of.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [00:46:10] Can I lovingly say, you've helped us all fill our shelves for it?

D. Michael Quinn [00:46:17] Well, I didn't intend to do that, but I knew in writing the books that I wrote that for some people this would be their reason for leaving the church. And I felt that I had a dual responsibility. I had a responsibility to present the evidence about this issue or various issues as best I could could, as best I understood it, to acknowledge that there was a position not of faith that one could understand this from, but also to affirm that there was a position of faith that one could understand this from. But you had to re examine your faith and reinterpret it.

D. Michael Quinn [00:47:04] And I acknowledge that that would be the. The case as I explained it to others about the magic worldview it was like to other people, to other people that it was like looking at the optical illusion. And some people can see only two faces and the other people see the outline of a vase.

D. Michael Quinn [00:47:29] And when your mind switches and you can see what you were not able to see before, you can never go back to seeing only one side of the optical illusion. You know the other side is there. And sometimes your mind flips even as you're looking at it back and forth.

D. Michael Quinn [00:47:49] And that's how I perceived early Mormonism. I could never go back to understanding early Mormonism without the imperial influence of magic in the occult. And whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, for me, it was a necessary thing. And I felt that that would also be the best resolution that readers of the book could come to. And I recognized that others would choose a simpler path with another approach of philosophy, and that is accept the Occam's Razor approach. The simplest answer is the best answer. And for many, the simplest answer is, Joseph Smith was a fraud and a charlatan, and this proves it.

D. Michael Quinn [00:48:38] And I actually, while I was at byu, a few months after I published it, I had a student who told me his stake president had passed on to him. What he wanted me to tell him was the reason result when his son read that book, and his son, a returned missionary, came in, slammed my book down on his father's desk, and said, this is the last straw. I'm leaving the church. And that's not why I wrote the book. But even as I wrote it, I knew that some could come to that conclusion.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [00:49:09] I liked what Ann said at the beginning about you having confidence both in the church and in your readers. Do you feel like that's part of the conviction that.

D. Michael Quinn [00:49:22] I think that it's a condescending attitude that some leaders have that they can understand these problem areas and they can know about them because their faith is so strong they would never fall. But we can't allow the unwashed masses to have this knowledge or they would never leave the church. I regard that as spiritually arrogant and as a disconfirming lack of confidence in the faith of average members of the church. I see no reason why a new convert or a longtime member of the church cannot have a stronger testimony than an apostle. There is absolutely no reason why an apostle should have a stronger testimony than an average member.

D. Michael Quinn [00:50:09] Everyone is entitled to the power of God in whatever form. God wants to reveal himself or herself to the person. And I think it undermines the church to have this condescending attitude toward the weakness of the faith in average members. And so my point of view is that I don't want to topple people's faith because that can be done if they're not prepared. But the effort that I've encouraged is start preparing them in seminary with just a tidbit a week. That there is a humanity once a week isn't much to ask. And you can do this with teenagers to say, yes, there were problems in Missouri, and some of them we brought on ourselves as a people.

D. Michael Quinn [00:51:01] End of startling revelation. That's the one for that week and allow the students to assimilate that and ask follow up questions and maybe another week refer to something else like Joseph Smith did have multiple wives. That at least opens the door to teenagers that there is a more complex experience of Mormonism than they themselves may know about. And that way they're not going to be blindsided by these and primarily evangelical Protestants who use Mormon history as a battering ram to destroy the faith of members of the church who haven't heard of these things. And I think it's healthy to give what Leonard Arrington called inoculation of a small dose of these realities so that if they're blindsided, they're not going to be destroyed, which is the whole purpose of inoculation in a medical sense.

D. Michael Quinn [00:52:08] And I think that approach can be used in teaching children, teaching teenagers, teaching adults, teaching converts. But I can't do that in a book. I can't go to every individual reader and say, you know, this is what I hope for you. All I can do is say I'm as I have in my prefaces, say I'm a believer. And I believe that this information can provide a broader understanding of the Mormon experience that does not undermine faith, but it will change your understanding of the Mormon past. Because anytime we understand something more deeply, whether it's music or literature or the religion, it changes our understanding of that thing the more we learn about it.

D. Michael Quinn [00:53:00] And so that's what I've done. And then once I've laid that out, usually in the preface, then it's no barred from that point forward.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [00:53:08] Gloves are off.

D. Michael Quinn [00:53:09] Yeah.

Coming Out and Sexuality in the LDS Context

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [00:53:11] All right,

Guest 2 [00:53:14] so

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [00:53:17] I'm thinking about your time during the Leonard Arrington years. I believe it was Davis Bitton who first brought you on. Before we get to that, I remember you tell a story about an interview you had with Spence W. Kimball where he made a promise to you, is that right?

D. Michael Quinn [00:53:32] It wasn't before that. It was before I went, went to Yale.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [00:53:37] Tell that story real quick, if you don't mind.

D. Michael Quinn [00:53:40] Well, I was finishing up my year and a half, or I've been about a year with Leonard at the point that I wanted to go to Spencer W. Kimball. And what I really wanted to talk about was this spiritual arrogance, I guess is the way to describe it, of thinking that I was going to be an apostle one day. And this had been encouraged by people in my ward, by my grandmother and I as a missionary. I'd had an experience that seemed to reinforce that.

D. Michael Quinn [00:54:24] And I, by the time I was been married seven years or six years rather six years. It was 1973 and I was gay. And my wife and I were struggling with my being gay. The idea that I could even still think of being an apostle was just preposterous to me. But I couldn't shake the feelings that this is what God wanted for me.

D. Michael Quinn [00:54:56] So I thought, if nothing else would change my mind, for me to be told by the President of the quorum of the 12 that this was a delusion. And if he gave me a blessing to overcome that delusion, then I could be at peace and maybe finally give up that delusion. And so that's. That's what I went to see President Kimball for. And instead he said that that promise would be fulfilled, which didn't make my life any easier.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [00:55:31] You still holding on hope that that might happen?

D. Michael Quinn [00:55:33] No, no, no. Not a snowball's chance.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [00:55:41] So he was speaking as a man when he said that?

D. Michael Quinn [00:55:43] I don't know or I was unworthy of the blessing. All I know is that there are many blessings that people receive, whether they're healing blessings or not, that are not fulfilled in the form that they're uttered. And why? That is the easy answer. The Rackham Razor answer is there is no God. And this is self delusion. To think that you are receiving or that this precept holder is receiving God's message when he says words over you. That's one approach. The other approach is the Job approach, which is the complex approach, not the Occam's razor approach, that you shake your hand at God in prayer and say why? And God says you don't know enough to understand the answer. And that's the message of Job and that's the message that I've internalized. I don't understand enough.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [00:56:38] Are you shaking your fist a little bit?

D. Michael Quinn [00:56:40] Oh, I have, yeah, I have. That's my relationship with God. It's a parental child relationship. Very often I'm the whiny child.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [00:56:51] When did you first feel you were different in terms of your sexuality and talk a little bit about being homosexual? In the 60s and 70s in the church.

D. Michael Quinn [00:57:05] My mother perceived this in me when I was about 6. But she didn't tell me this until I came out to her when I was an adult in middle age. And when I asked her as a middle aged out man, why she thought I was homosexual inclined, which was her term and the common term, remembering back, you know, as many years as she was having to remember back, she said that she couldn't remember anything in particular. It was just that I was different from other Boys. And those differences in her mind when I was six added up to, well, maybe he's homosexually inclined. But because. Because I, at age 12, read everything I could about homosexuality in the public library.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [00:58:04] What year would this have been?

D. Michael Quinn [00:58:05] What year? When I was 12, 1956. And everything was negative.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [00:58:10] Was that term even around back then?

D. Michael Quinn [00:58:12] Oh, yeah. Homosexuality was a term in the English language since 1892. But. But everything was negative.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [00:58:21] It was like a mental disorder.

Guest 2 [00:58:23] Right.

D. Michael Quinn [00:58:24] And even the novels that were written, which I devoured by gay authors, they all ended unhappily, Suicide, death. I mean, it was just how it was presented, even by authors writing novels. That was the convention they had to follow in order to get published, to even deal with the topic. And it had to have a serves you right ending. And anyway, that was all I read when I was 12. And I read all of Kinsey, and I read Freud and I read Havelock Ellis. And they were the experts at the time.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [00:59:05] Yeah, he's reading Kinsey at 12. I just want to make that note.

D. Michael Quinn [00:59:09] Well, I'd begun this. My grandmother bought me the Encyclobeaudia Britannica when I was 12. And they were working class people. This was a big sacrifice. And so I decided that I would make their investment worthwhile. And so I started reading it page by page.

D. Michael Quinn [00:59:27] It took me eight years, but by the time I was 18, I'd finished all 23 volumes, plus the index, I won't count, of the Encyclopedia Britannica. So I was just a. I was a kid who watched 20 hours of TV a week, who saw two or three movies a week, and who loved reading. And so I, you know, it was all of a piece for me. So reading Kinsey's Sexual Behavior of the Human Male from COVID to cover was. Was no biggie for me when I. I was 12 and Freud and Havelock Ellis and all, and everything was negative. And I just decided, this isn't what God wants for me and this isn't what I want for myself.

D. Michael Quinn [01:00:15] And so I decided, and I have this iron will, that I was going to live a straight life and make it work. And it was you and me, God. And he was the only one I confided in. And so I started dating girls when I was 13 and just lived a celibate life and expected that when I got married I would experience normal, quote, unquote sexuality and my homosexual needs and desires. And I recognized them as both desires and needs, but I felt that they would just kind of wither on the vine once I Was experiencing wild animal sex with my beloved wife, who I've been sealed to.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:01:02] How'd that go?

D. Michael Quinn [01:01:04] Well, wild animal sex with your wife when you're a closeted male makes your homosexual desires more prominent. You can't suppress one side of your sexuality while you're acting. And when I say suppress, you can't express the feelings if you allow your feelings. On the other side of the equation, if you are somewhere in the middle on the Kinsey scale and you can respond both sexually to males and females,

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:01:39] is that where you put yourself in the middle of the king?

D. Michael Quinn [01:01:41] Not right in the middle. I'm more of like a. A four. Four, yeah.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:01:44] What's the max? Five or six?

D. Michael Quinn [01:01:46] Seven. Or pardon me, six. I wish I were a seven. It would have been. Made my life easier. But six. Is the. Is this exclusively homosexual on the. On the Kinsey scale?

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:01:57] So some attraction to the opposite.

D. Michael Quinn [01:01:59] Yeah. And I responded to my wife and I loved my wife. But our love making.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:02:06] Tell her you were gay?

D. Michael Quinn [01:02:07] Not when we got married, no. I thought, why should I think about it?

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:02:10] Oh yeah, you were confident that you'd be cured. Maybe.

D. Michael Quinn [01:02:13] Well, that and also I thought, why should I confess and possibly disrupt our engagement with being tempted? Because I'd never done anything.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:02:22] So you'd never have any sexual relations or.

D. Michael Quinn [01:02:25] No.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:02:25] So never been abused.

D. Michael Quinn [01:02:28] Anyway, the only way I could suppress my homosexuality once I was experiencing sex with my wife was to suppress my response to her. And of course this created all kinds of problems.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:02:45] So you wouldn't be intimate with your wife, so you wouldn't augment your feelings towards men.

D. Michael Quinn [01:02:49] Right. Because after having a night of sexual experience with my wife, I'd wake up in the middle of the night dreaming of doing that with a man.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:03:01] And was it uncomfortable or unpleasant to be with your wife?

D. Michael Quinn [01:03:06] No, it was okay. But a woman and a man in a marriage needs more than a spouse who's okay with them, they need someone who's ardent. And I couldn't allow myself to be ardent and I didn't feel it fully. But if I, to the degree I became ardent with my wife, it made my homosexual responses more ardent.

D. Michael Quinn [01:03:34] And I've heard psychotherapists say that it's like two sides of a timber. If you raise a timber or a tree or whatever you want to pull, whatever you want to describe, you're raising both sides of it. And. And if you are attracted to both males and females, experiencing one side is going to influence you to want the other.

Navigating Same-Sex Attraction as a Believer

D. Michael Quinn [01:04:03] And people who are at the kinsey extremes, the 0 for 0 homosexual response or behavior and or the 6, this isn't much of a problem for them. But for people who can expect experience both somewhere in that middling area, it can allow homosexually inclined males and females to marry and quote, be successful by having children and having sexual relations. But it increases, at least by my experience and the experience of hundreds that I've spoken with, it increases the desire for the forbidden and the need for, for the forbidden. And it creates a living hell. And so that's. I was going through that at this point with my wife.

D. Michael Quinn [01:04:54] And so that was another reason I wanted. It wasn't just I wanted to be rid of aspiring for church office. The phrase that's kind of a cliche in Mormonism. I also just wanted to be free of the delusion, which is how I regarded it, that I, as a unhappily married, loving husband, father of children, with my loving wife, unhappily married to me, could even think of being an apostle.

D. Michael Quinn [01:05:27] And so that's why I went to him. But the outcome wasn't what I expected when he asked me if I wanted the blessing and I said yes. And I expected him, him to bless me, to overcome my desires. And he instead blessed me that that blessing and that promise and that expectation would be fulfilled.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:05:45] You didn't talk to him about your homosexuality?

D. Michael Quinn [01:05:47] No, again, because I hadn't done anything and I knew he had a blind spot about homosexuality and I just didn't want to invite problems.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:05:57] Sure.

D. Michael Quinn [01:05:58] And that, you know, that you could say that's cowardice, that's withholding unnecessary information. And yes, it was both of those things. But at the time I didn't feel that I should be subject myself to all kinds of problems really because I was being tempted, I hadn't done anything. So that was the approach I took.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:06:27] Was it hard to not have that taken away by God?

D. Michael Quinn [01:06:31] By not, I mean the expectation, was it.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:06:34] No, sorry. Was it hard to not have the feelings of same sex attraction taken away?

D. Michael Quinn [01:06:39] Oh yes.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:06:41] You prayed. I assume you prayed.

D. Michael Quinn [01:06:42] Oh yeah. No, it was a terrible experience.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:06:47] Is that one of those fist shaking moments?

D. Michael Quinn [01:06:49] No, it wasn't that. And I don't know exactly why because I know I've met many Mormon raised gay men who have been devastated in their faith. But typically the response from them that I heard and my own was that you're not good enough, that somehow it's your fault and that you don't have faith enough and you're not trying enough. And that's usually the message rather than this is who you are and deal with it, because God is dealing with it.

D. Michael Quinn [01:07:27] And that I wish had been a message that I'd gotten as a kid. But even psychiatrists and gay authors, novelists like James Baldwin, were presenting a very dark, negative view of homosexual relations, homosexuality. So I was a product of my generation and the worldview in which I was raised and in which even out gay men were living their lives in a form of internalized homophobia and self hatred and self loathing. And so that just was part of the package that I grew up with.

The September Six and LDS Intellectual Tensions

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:08:10] This question may fit a little better later when we talk about the September 6th stuff. September, yeah, but when I was at BYU in 1993, I remember hearing about September 6th, and I was kind of bothered. And this is going to be a little bit of a tough question, but I want to share it with you for an opportunity to either dispel it or provide perspective or deny it or whatever. But I was talking to a family member who was an employee at BYU, and I was just kind of saying, man, the September 6th thing is a bummer. And I don't like it, and it kind of bothers me.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:08:51] And why should the church be excommunicating people just for being good historians like Michael Quinn? I don't get it. And what he said to me was, one of the advantages people who are excommunicated have over the church leaders who have to perform excommunications is that the people being excommunicated can talk about it, but the leaders can't. And he said there were other reasons that people were excommunicated besides writing history.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:09:29] And what he was inferring or what he actually explicitly said was, was, you know, Michael Quinn was gay and he was perusing the bars of Provo and seducing young men. I don't know what he was saying, but that was, you know, that was what he laid on me. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, the world's more complex than I thought. You know?

D. Michael Quinn [01:09:51] No. And yes. The common assumption in Mormon society is people, particularly 20th century, is that people aren't excommunicated for apostasy, they're only excommunicated for sex. And that has been a kind of enduring folk belief. And I participated in that myself in the sense that when. When I heard that somebody in my stake was excommunicated, it was, well, what did she do? Or what did he do? I mean, the assumption is it's behavior, and that's ingrained, and many people will not abandon that. No, Matter what.

D. Michael Quinn [01:10:36] The advantage that I had in my side of the story is that the Stake president began the process with a letter where he outlined why he was going to be investigating me for a disciplinary court. And the letter outlined evidences of my apostasy. And they were everything that I published or said to the newspapers during the past year.

D. Michael Quinn [01:11:04] So the three specific examples he gave was my article and in 1992 about women in the priesthood, published in the book Women in Authority by Maxine Hanks, who's right there in the back, who was also excommunicated the same month I was. The other example that he gave in the letter was my article in Sunstone about 150 years of truth and consequences in Mormon history, showing the tension between the leadership and those who disclosed uncomfortable facts about the past and how that tension had worked out, very often in excommunication. And the third example he gave, which showed that he had no sense of irony, was my statement to the newspapers that the 19th century church accepted diversity and a loyal opposition and the 20th century church did not accept accept a loyal opposition and wanted cookie cutter Mormons instead.

D. Michael Quinn [01:12:07] Anyway, he had written this and signed it, and he didn't expect that I was not going to lie down quickly and roll over and say, you know, kick me again. And so instead I was on my way to California before he even came to my door. And I had a three month fellowship with the Huntington Library there. And so before I took off, I went to the AP reporter that I knew and I went to Peggy Fletcher Stack and the Salt Lake Driboon and I gave them copies of this letter and I gave them a copy of my, the response that I wrote to him and mailed to him.

D. Michael Quinn [01:12:48] And then I went off to California and this ended up in the Salt Lake Tribune and it ended up as an AP wire story which was published in the LA Times. So the short answer is that this began as an accusation of apostasy over my publications, including my being quoted by the media.

D. Michael Quinn [01:13:14] And throughout the months that this dragged on, when the Mission Temple, excuse me, the stake president of the Salt Lake Stake, kept knocking on my door or writing me letters or phoning me saying he wanted me to come in and subject myself to an interview, I just said, I'm not playing this game. I've been through this before. I know you're under orders from church headquarters, despite what you say, and I'm not going to participate in a kangaroo court and I'm not going to to participate in my own intimidation. So I refuse to meet with you and I'll acknowledge your letters, but don't expect me to do any more.

D. Michael Quinn [01:13:53] And he made it clear that he wanted a kind of a fishing expedition approach to my whole life. But I just said, I'm not going to talk with you about anything. And so it doesn't matter what you think. And in the final letter that I got announcing my excommunication, it specified. And this also Lavina had access to and referred to in the essay she wrote about me in a book called Mormon Mavericks.

D. Michael Quinn [01:14:25] The statement specified that I was excommunicated for conduct on becoming a church member in my refusal to cooperate with the stake president. That was it. And the weird thing was that apostasy wasn't even in there anymore, nor was homosexuality, nor was homosexuality, nor. And they defined my conduct unbecoming as my refusal to cooperate with the stake president, which I stated from the beginning, from February on, this was in September.

D. Michael Quinn [01:14:59] And the strange thing was that. But my historical writings on apostasy dropped out of the announcement of my. Of the reasons for my excommunication. In the official letter I received, I received a backstory from somebody who was at the meeting that you didn't attend your extra. No, I didn't. I told him I would not. But somebody who was there said that the discussion in the High Council was over whether my statements, my recorded statements at Sunstone, my publications actually did constitute publication. Pardon me, apostasy. And there was a split in the High Council. And some said it did and some said it didn't.

D. Michael Quinn [01:15:46] And at that point, the person who was there was dismissed from the meeting. And my read of the situation was that the reason it was no longer mentioned, even though this is what started it in his initial letter to me, was that there was no unanimous vote on my publications constituting apostasy. And so the thing he could get a unanimous vote on, about which there was no dispute and which I had acknowledged verbally and in every letter I'd written him, was that I refused to cooperate with him. And for that I could be accused, as I was, of insubordination.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:16:32] And you came out as gay? Wind.

D. Michael Quinn [01:16:33] I didn't come out as gay until three years later, 96, when I published the same sex book. And I knew that in writing that and publishing it, I would get specific questions from people of all different backgrounds about my motives for writing it and my sexual orientation. And so I knew that that would out me, but that was. I was ready for it at that point. I still didn't take out billboard signs, but the fact remains that in 1996, with the publication of the book, I was out a gay man.

Working in the Church Archives Under Arrington

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:17:10] Okay, well, I want to jump back a little bit now because we haven't talked about your years in the Arrington administration. And I guess when I first started reading the Power series, the two books on power origins and extensions of Power, I was kind of trying to envision you in the 70s and what you were doing. And what I envisioned was this man who as quietly as he could, would go into church archives and just be like hand copying or photocopying as many possible journals and diaries and records as he could so that over a 10 year period he could amass this massive collection of records so that then he could, you know, write a bunch of books on whatever topics he wanted. But I'm just curious, like, is that kind of what you were doing and what was driving you to collect so much information?

D. Michael Quinn [01:18:11] Well, when I started, I was a graduate student at byu, hired by Davis Bitten, who was my advisor and a professor at BYU to be his chief research assistant, which was a title he gave me even though he'd hired others before me. I, I was the one who was going to be the chief one.

D. Michael Quinn [01:18:32] And I was to do research and diaries at the church archives. And that was my part time job for that year, from April 1973 until December when his money went out and he could no longer hire me to do that. Well, when I asked him what he wanted to me to write, he told me that there were certain things he was really interested in. He was really interested in dreams or visions that people might record in their autobiographies or their diaries.

D. Michael Quinn [01:19:06] And I said, well, what else besides that? And do you just want me? And he said no, anything you think is interesting, wrong thing to say to me because for example, when I got the Heber J. Grant Dust diaries and went through them, I handed him 200 pages of single space typed notes. And he just, he just, his eyes just rolled back and he said, this is for one diary or one set of diaries, one person's diaries. And I said yes, because it's so interesting. And I, you know, and it's interesting to me and I thought it would be interesting to you, but you know, read it over, look it over and if you don't want me to do this anymore, then, you know, then I won't.

D. Michael Quinn [01:19:52] And he came back to me the next day and just said, keep it up, keep doing it. And so I would give him the original copy of what I typed and I kept carbons And I told him, I asked him if that would be all right for me to do that. And he said yes. And he was my advisor as a graduate student and he knew that I was interested in Mormon history. And so that's what I did. And I just took notes on anything that interested me, anything that was new or sensational or controversial or I thought, wow, that's interesting. Whether it's a vision that the person has or a dream of seeing Jesus, or they're smoking on tobacco because the First Presidency told them to, because they were nervous type, which was George, not George.

D. Michael Quinn [01:20:42] James E. Talmage's experience, the First Presidency commanded him to smoke tobacco, to unwind, because he was wound up too tightly. No matter what it was, if it was doctrinal, if it was something about church administration where like ward members would vote against a bishop that had been given to them by the visiting apostles and the apostles would say, well, who do you want?

D. Michael Quinn [01:21:11] I mean, these kinds of things that were not my own experience especially. I wrote down all, and I took detailed notes. I didn't summarize. I took verbatim notes of these various entries. And I continued that for 15 years of research in church. 15 years. 15.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:21:33] Like a kid in a candy store.

D. Michael Quinn [01:21:35] Pardon?

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:21:35] Like a kid in a candy store.

D. Michael Quinn [01:21:36] Yeah, very much. And yet I, as I said, I started out totally independent. I was an employee of a professor when I started doing this. And then in December when my, when my job with Davis Bitten ended, Leonard invited me to be his research assistant in Salt Lake, because his former research assistant in Salt Lake who had introduced us, Dick Bennett, was going to Canada for a PhD program there. And so that left Leonard without a research assistant at church archives. And he hired me. And then two months later I got a phone call from him and he said that he had been invited by the First Presidency to be the official church historian and he wanted to hire me as the first member of his staff.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:22:30] What was he like?

D. Michael Quinn [01:22:31] He was wonderful. Leonard. Leonard was this Idaho potato farmer who remained as down to earth his whole Life, despite a PhD from Duke University and being the president of the Western History association and this sterling professor of economics and history at USU Utah State University. He always maintained that down to earth, dirt under my fingernails, kind of personality and back slapping kind of guy. He was just so disarming and so wonderful to work with as a boss that I really can't sing his praises enough. However, of the people who joined after he was appointed church historian and I had my interview with Alvin R. Dyer, who at that Time was the managing director.

D. Michael Quinn [01:23:37] That was in February. Of the ones who were being hired from that point forward, I was the first to leave. I ended my work with Leonard on his staff in August of 1993. So I was there only about 18 months. And when I came back, I came back as an independent researcher, not 93.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:24:00] What year?

D. Michael Quinn [01:24:01] Oh, pardon me. 1973. Excuse me, 1973. So I started in interviewed in February 1972. My official starting date was March 1972. And in August 1973, I ended my employment there to go to Yale. Now I wanted to go back on his staff, and Leonard wanted me to go back on his staff, but it just never worked out because when he had available slots to hire people, I was still at Yale and couldn't go full time. And so he hired other people. And when I was available, after I was almost done with my dissertation and then got my degree and I was available, he had no slot.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:24:46] So you didn't work under him after your PhD?

D. Michael Quinn [01:24:49] No, I was never. I often went back on what he called fellowships that he provided out of money that he received as royalties for things that he published and that Davis Bitten and James Allen, his assistants, published. They voluntarily turned their royalties, their personal royalties, into what they called the Mormon History Trust Fund. And from that, they, Leonard would, with their advice and consent, would give fellowships to people to do research on particular topics. And I would get those. But that was my only even formal connection with Leonard from that time forward. After that, I was a graduate student at Yale. Then I was a professor at BYU and never was in his employ again.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:25:43] Many will know that those years were kind of called the Camelot years of church history from what, 72 to 82? Something like that?

D. Michael Quinn [01:25:49] Yes.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:25:49] Did you feel that excitement?

D. Michael Quinn [01:25:50] Oh, yes.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:25:51] What did that. What was that like? And what was it like to see it all?

D. Michael Quinn [01:25:54] Leonard was this expansive person. I mean, he just. His personality was just expansive and positive. And he had this. And he had reason for it because the First Presidency had approved these various recommendations he made for the things that he thought the Church History Division and the Historical Department as a whole should do for outreach to the Mormon community as well as to the non Mormon community.

D. Michael Quinn [01:26:26] And the First Presidency had approved all of these proposals. And so he had the justifiable expectation that things would just get better and better and better. And for a while they did. But then within about four years, things began reversing and he found that the First Presidency, when he was criticized, we learned that he was criticized by members of the 12, the First Presidency didn't inform them that they had already proved these things at length. Leonard was being criticized for, and understandably Spencer W. Kimball had other things, many other things that were far more important to him than history. He didn't feel threatened by history.

D. Michael Quinn [01:27:16] It wasn't his thing either. And Leonard's appointment had occurred under President Kimball's predecessor, who was first predecessor first in January of 1973 or two rather. Joseph Fielding Smith was the president when he received the initial call as church historian. And then after that July, then Harold B. Lee was president when things really started, were starting to move. After Leonard had been president or pardon me, a church historian, the official sustained church historian for about three months.

The End of the Arrington Era as Church Historian

D. Michael Quinn [01:27:57] And then after Harold B. Lee's unexpected death, Spencer W. Kimball became president. And while he was interested in history in a kind of informal way, it was not a consuming interest for him. And he just had other things that understandably kept his attention.

D. Michael Quinn [01:28:20] And Leonardo priorities kind of fell through the cracks. And with apostles who considered Leonard uppity at the back of the church bus, this was not good for a president to no longer be one he could turn to for these kinds of decisions that he'd gotten. When Harold believes

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:28:47] Benson, Brucelle McConkey.

D. Michael Quinn [01:28:49] No, no. Ezra Taft, Benson, Markey Peterson and Boyd K. Packer were the three who all shared a suspicion of what was going on in the historical department and misgivings about Leonard's appointment from the get go. And as time progressed and more and more publications were coming out by both non Mormons and Mormons scholars based on the research that they had done, which Leonard hadn't allowed them to do. It would have been initially Howard W. Hunter and then the archivist Earl Olson, who had granted access to materials. But Leonard had been the driving force for historians learning about this ability to do the research. And he'd been encouraging them to come as a part of the outreach that he felt he had for his presidency approval for.

D. Michael Quinn [01:29:50] And so he became the fall guy in this Greek drama. And the apostles blamed him for everyone who was disturbed or upset or embarrassed about something they read that was based on research done since 1972.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:30:09] And so it fell. Do you remember talking to Leonard about the fall after it fell and what it did to him or how it made him feel?

D. Michael Quinn [01:30:16] Well, even before he was, and this is in 1977 when he was still the official church historian, he said that. But a man who's received a calling from the first presidency ought to be allowed to function in that calling and to do what he was commissioned to do, and if they don't approve of it, then release him. That was Leonard's statement to me in October 1977. So he was feeling the pressure then and was very unhappy at that point. And that is earlier than most people recognize that he was under that kind of pressure. But he expressed that to me, and he was not a person to confide.

D. Michael Quinn [01:31:06] He kept his cards very close to the vest, and that was one of the very few times that he expressed his feelings of frustration with his position. And I didn't express that to anyone else. Leonard is now long dead, and I feel I can talk about it.

Quinn's Interview with Boyd K. Packer and BYU Career

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:31:33] Talk briefly about your interview with Boyd K. Packer. I mean, it's kind of mind boggling to think that you would go to BYU and that BYU would hire you after all of this, but maybe talk briefly about your. Your interview with Boyd K. Pecker.

D. Michael Quinn [01:31:48] Well, that was not pleasant news when I learned that he was going to be the general authority to interview me. And I prayed a lot, nonstop, in fact, from the day, the afternoon when I was told that he was going to be interviewing me, to the next day when I had the interview.

D. Michael Quinn [01:32:13] The interview lasted about 45 minutes, but aside from maybe three minutes, it was all a lecture by Boyd Packer or asking me questions about history. It wasn't an interview, not in the sense that I had expected it, anyway.

D. Michael Quinn [01:32:32] He started out by saying that he had a hard time with historians because historians idolized the truth. And it went downhill from there. And I repeatedly, every time you would ask me this leading question about, well, what would you do if you found this in a diary and you were writing a biography of this man? And I tried in my, you know, to talk about putting things in context. And it's, you know, it's a decision whether you put something in a footnote or whether you devote a sentence to it or a paragraph or whole chapter. It depends on your reading of the significance of the controversy or whatever.

D. Michael Quinn [01:33:12] But he just kept shaking his head that he obviously did not agree with me. And at the end of the interview, he said, well, I'll put on the form that you are worthy of being hired by byu. But it was very clear that he did not think I shouldn't belong there, that I should go there because he didn't like historians, particularly of my persuasion and my view of telling the truth in context, et cetera. That didn't go anywhere with him.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:33:47] Yet I remember you saying that you were not only hired by byu, but you were able to achieve the equivalent of tenure and that he didn't oppose that, or at least you have no evidence?

D. Michael Quinn [01:33:58] Well, I don't know that he opposed it or supported it. I don't know.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:34:01] He certainly didn't keep that from happening.

D. Michael Quinn [01:34:03] He didn't keep it from happening. And I was promoted up the ranks quite quickly at byu and all those decisions of promotion had to be finalized by the board of trustees of which he was a member. But that's all I can say. I don't know if those meetings, I don't know if they require unanimous votes. Nearly everything else does. I would think it requires unanimous vote, but I don't know. The fact remains that while he was on the board of trustees, I was promoted and eventually received BYU's equivalent of tenure.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:34:38] I'm going to refer listeners and you guys to an interview that Martha Sontag Bradley did with Michael Quinn in 1995 where they talk about his time at BYU, what type of mentor he was to the historians there, what his experiences were. It's a really wonderful thing to listen to and what it meant for Michael to raise young historians. We're going to skip that tonight, but I don't want to skip. And also it talks about some of the publications and writings that he did that led up to an interview, an interesting interview, the stake president, but I do want to have you. So we're going to sort of say you had a great career at byu, you mentored a lot of students, did some great scholarly work, and then you got a call from your state president. And I'd love to hear that story.

D. Michael Quinn [01:35:26] Pardon? Date of the interview 1985. In the spring, in April, Dialogue came out with a nearly hundred page article that I had written published on plural marriage after the manifesto. And it was titled LDS Church Authority and New Plural Marriages, 1890-1904. And after giving a historical background to the manifesto, I looked at each member of the first presidency from then till 1904 and, and how they responded to the issue of the manifesto and demonstrated from archival documents and diaries and other sources, written sources, that the first presidency almost, well, to a man, had given encouragement, had authorized plural marriages, had authorized the officiators of plural marriages, had in some cases performed plural marriages.

D. Michael Quinn [01:36:38] Well, I got a call in the month after that from my stake president who said he needed to talk with me. So he did. And he told me that he had had a two and a half hour meeting with our area president, who was Hugh Pinnock at that point and. Not Pinnock.

D. Michael Quinn [01:37:01] No, not Pinnock. Paramore was. James Paramore was our regional representative. I mean our area president at that time and the stake president said that the upshot of the meeting was that President Pinnock had told my stake president and his two counselors at this meeting that three apostles had given Elder Pinnock instructions to have this meeting with the stake president and to inform the stake President that the apostles regarded my article and dialogue as speaking evil of the Lord's Anointed and that that I should have my temple recommend immediately re yanked and that if that did not keep me from doing Mormon history, then he should take further action against me.

D. Michael Quinn [01:37:57] Well, the stake president told me this and then told me that he had a two and a half hour argument with James Paramore over this matter, which was not what Elder Paramore was expecting. And, and my stake president and both his counselors, one of whom had been my bishop when I was the bishop's counselor, the other of whom was a son of Gordon B. Hinckley.

D. Michael Quinn [01:38:23] And those three had spent two and a half hours arguing with Elder Paramore that this was inappropriate, that there was nothing in the article which all of them had read that they regarded as Apostle State or as speaking evil of the Lord's Anointed, that instead I was dealing with a difficult period of time in Mormon history and laying it out as best I could. And they said that they had enjoyed the article and Elder Paramore was not prepared for that response and said that he had his instructions to get the affirmation from the Stake President that he was going to take my temple recommend. And the stake president said that he did not regard that as justifiable, but he would meet with me and discuss with me.

D. Michael Quinn [01:39:15] He said, and of course I'm going to talk about our meeting that we've had for the last two and a half hours. And Elder Paramore said, oh no, you can't do that. You've got to tell him that this is your idea.

D. Michael Quinn [01:39:28] You can't say that this came from me or worse, from apostles. This was your concern about the article. And my stake president said, Elder Paramore, you have two choices. Either I do nothing and I say nothing to him or I tell him the truth.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:39:47] He's another truth idolizer, right?

D. Michael Quinn [01:39:50] And wasn't an academic, he was an insurance company executive. So anyway, he lays this out for me and my former bishop, who was his counselor, his second counselor did as well. I wasn't as well acquainted with Richard Hinckley who was the first counselor, but I had known him. I'd spoken in his ward a number of times as a high Council representative and so he knew me and said that he had the article, although I had given a copy of it to my bishop before the change in the bishopric had occurred quite recently.

D. Michael Quinn [01:40:31] Anyway, so the article came out and the stake president explained the situation. And he said, mike, I feel I have to do something. I've told you everything that has transpired. But he said, I feel that I have to take your temple recommend to do something that they've asked me to do, but I will not go the other step and I will not do anything further. But he said, I'm an insurance executive and I'm not going to try to tell you how to do history, but please find some way to do history without these conflicts with the brother.

D. Michael Quinn [01:41:15] And I said I would do my best to do that, but I didn't know how I could do both at the same time. And so that was where we left. He told me that he thought the requirement of taking my temple recommend was a backdoor effort to have me fired at byu. So he told me specifically, if anyone at BYU asks if you have a temple recommend, tell them that you do.

D. Michael Quinn [01:41:42] And if they want any further information, give them my name and telephone number. And don't volunteer that your temple recommend is in my desk drawer, and when it expires, I'll renew it. And all I will say to anyone who asks is that you have a valid temple recommend and that where it remained for the next three years until I left byu.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:42:07] A fun story. I'd love to meet that man. Shake his hand.

Resignation from BYU and Academic Aftermath

Guest [01:42:15] So

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:42:18] did you consider, why did you resign from byu? Why didn't you? Why didn't you make them fire you or make a big stink about it? Why don't you stick around?

D. Michael Quinn [01:42:26] Well, contrary to what many people think, I don't run to the newspapers with the exception of this effort to 1993, when I did with the letter from the stake president. But I speak to the media only when they speak to me and when they ask me to respond to something. And then I'll answer their questions as best they can. And as many people might be surprised to know, I do not like conflict. I dislike it and tend to.

D. Michael Quinn [01:42:56] And I By the time the book was published, Magic Worldview was published in August 1987, I was sick of conflict. And it just intensified after its publication, and I knew I was dead meat at byu. I knew if I had actually just inadvertently moved out of our stake after my wife and I separated and divorced, that I would have been in a stake where the stake president didn't know me and he would just immediately have done what Elder Paramore had asked him to do.

D. Michael Quinn [01:43:31] And so if I moved to another stake or a new stake president came who wasn't as uppity as this one, I was dead neat in the church. And so I wanted to leave BYU on my own terms. I didn't want to be kicked out. And so I began making inquiries about other places I could go, other positions I might go to. And I got a wonderful offer from a man who became my next mentor.

D. Michael Quinn [01:44:04] His name was Ridge Martin Ridge. He was a professor of history, Western American history at Caltech University, and he was also head of the research department at the Huntington Library near Caltech. He offered me a total of a year and a half of fellowships, full time, to allow me to leave BYU if I wanted to.

D. Michael Quinn [01:44:30] This was like manna from heaven. As soon as I got his telephone offer, before it was in writing to me in the mail, I sat down and started typing the letter of resignation from byu. But because the term had already begun, I made it effective as of the end of that. That term, which was May.

D. Michael Quinn [01:44:55] And so that's why I resigned. I did not want to be pushed out. I didn't want to go through any more of the pressure. I was having students come to me and telling me that they were changing their major from history because their teachers were criticizing me in class, in religion class. And one of them said, mike, I don't want to end up like you. The church is my life.

D. Michael Quinn [01:45:22] And that honesty hurt. Honesty hurts. I mean, I recognize that. But I appreciated that student's point of view. I understood why he took that point of view and why he was changing his major, even though he'd taken every course I offered. And I just didn't want any. To experience any more of that.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:45:43] Did you ever imagine it would be your last university position?

D. Michael Quinn [01:45:47] I thought it might be because I had told others that BYU was a dead end, that once you were there, it was very difficult to get hired elsewhere because of the low reputation that BYU had academically in the nation.

D. Michael Quinn [01:46:07] People at BYU will be infuriated to hear me say that, but that was the essential common view of all the professors at BYU while I was there from 1970 to 1988, is that you can get into BYU and they may hire you for more than you could get at another university. But leaving BYU and being hired by another university is almost impossible, especially in the humanities. Especially in the humanities, with the job market.

D. Michael Quinn [01:46:41] So even though I hoped I did not hold out a lot of. But nonetheless, I had hope. By 2003, I no longer had hope. By the time that I was denied two positions for which I was the only candidate. University of Utah and Arizona State University.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:47:02] Then I just decided both LDs, administrators, donors, funders, state legislatures.

D. Michael Quinn [01:47:08] And with the Arizona state situation, it was different. One of their major donors said, I understand you're inviting Michael Quinn to be a faculty member. Is he more important than a hundred million dollar donation? Dead silence. And the provost understandably canceled the decision of the Department of Religious Studies and of two deans and a Chair of Religious Studies, and countermanded the decision to hire me.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:47:44] What's it like to be a distinguished historian graduate of Yale University and not able to get a job?

D. Michael Quinn [01:47:51] Yeah. Can't get enough respect. Yeah, Me and Rodney Dangerfield. It's painful, but, you know, my mission president, Mary D. Hanks, whose funeral I'm going to be attending tomorrow, was an inspiration to me in many ways. One of my several mentors of great significance. And when he was a missionary, he said, when you pick up one end of the stick, you end up picking up the other end, too.

D. Michael Quinn [01:48:26] And I thought of that a lot. Even though he was talking about it in relation to other things and being a good missionary and all of that, I thought about it that I had picked up this stick of Mormon history and I had to live with the consequences of what I had engaged in and what I had refused to retreat from. And so while I was hurt, disappointed, unhappy, I recognized that these were the consequences of decisions that I had started making when I was 17 and asked LeGrand Richards about Adam, God and plural marriage after the manifesto, and had continued with my intensive research from that point and beyond my expectations of publishing, which I had not expected to do about these problem areas. So I had picked up the other end of the stick. And I have to acknowledge that. And I did at the time.

Excommunication and the September Six Events

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:49:30] Okay, jumping now forward to September 6th. Really quickly, I want to refer those of you who get a chance. I think there's a book chapter that was written telling your story. It talks about sort of how you almost tried to live in hiding to avoid ext. Excommunication for many years. Went to New Orleans and other places. We won't tell those stories here, but just talk briefly about, I guess, how it felt to be excommunicated and what that did to you.

D. Michael Quinn [01:50:00] Well, this isn't true of everyone I know, people who've been excommunicated and who've been thrilled about it or have been indifferent, who couldn't care, like some of these boys in England who thought they were joining a baseball club and found out they were in a church and being excommunicated didn't mean much except no one likes to be kicked out of anything. But aside from that, they were rather indifferent. And I've known even generational Mormons, Mormons with pioneer ancestry, who have not for some reason been deeply connected to Mormonism. And so leaving the church was not a problem for them. Being excommunicated or asking to have their membership removed, not a problem for me.

D. Michael Quinn [01:50:49] It was huge and it was something that I dreaded. It's something I had tried to avoid. And when I've explained it to non Mormons, I've said it's hard for you to understand, but it's like dying and attending your own funeral.

D. Michael Quinn [01:51:10] It's that visceral kind of loss that you're grieving your own death and your membership has gone and been taken away and it is like a death in the family. And that's the easiest way I can describe it, except it's your own death and you're aware of it and you're going through the process of grieving.

D. Michael Quinn [01:51:40] So that usually didn't help my non Mormon friends or reporters to understand it because they thought the explanation was as weird as they regarded Mormonism anyway. But that's how I regarded it. It was like dying. But the one thing I did not expect, which was a total surprise to me, was the profound sense of relief I felt.

D. Michael Quinn [01:52:08] I was no longer hiding. I was no longer in fear of Damocles sword dropping or the guillotine or whatever symbol you want to use. And I no longer felt that I had to in any degree defend policies of the church that I disagreed with. And I had really, over the years, particularly from the ERA campaign of the church in the late 1970s onward, had just held my tongue about things that did not immediately involve what I was, and that was a historian of Mormon history and otherwise. I kept all of my reservations to myself and didn't even confide them to very many of my liberal friends, particularly the ERA issue.

D. Michael Quinn [01:52:58] I just didn't express my opposition to what was going on. And my excommunication relieved me of that obligation. I no longer had to defend the church as a, quote, loyal member. I no longer had to remain silent about things I absolutely thought were reprehensible and that was. And I no longer had to hide or be worried what I'd been afraid of had happened. And I wasn't prepared for that sense

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:53:33] of relief that I felt any desire to Come back.

D. Michael Quinn [01:53:37] No, no, still the one true church,

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:53:42] but don't want to join.

D. Michael Quinn [01:53:43] Yeah, it's the one true church, but I'm an aardvark or a duckbill platypus of Mormonism. I've always been sort of a church of one. And when I said that when I was a teenager and decided to live a straight life, and my attitude was, it's just you and me, Lord. Well, throughout my life, my relationship spiritually was very much that way. The church was. Was always secondary to my relationship with God. And I'd always test other issues of loyalty in the church with how I felt about it spiritually with God.

D. Michael Quinn [01:54:16] And I don't believe that baptism or any other ordinance, in fact, this is frequently taught. No ordinance is valid unless it's ratified by the Holy Spirit, Spirit of promise. Well, this isn't said, but excommunication is an ordinance, and that cannot be ratified and valid eternally unless it's ratified by the Holy Spirit of promise. And I don't think mine was. I trust in my relationship with God, and it's a very private relationship. I've attended other fellowships, Quaker and Anglican and the Gay and Lesbian fellowship that is available.

D. Michael Quinn [01:54:58] And I just haven't felt at home anywhere. And if I can't go to the church and partake of the sacrament, which for me is the only reason to go to church, then I don't want to go to church, and so I don't go. And the remarkable thing to me is that I've never missed not going.

D. Michael Quinn [01:55:19] And that that is strange to me because from the time I was a teenager, I was 100% attender, except in MIA when I went inactive for a few years. But aside from Mia, I was 100% as a teenager in all my meetings.

D. Michael Quinn [01:55:35] And for me to wake up on a Sunday morning after I'd stopped going to church and not miss it is really quite extraordinary. But having not attended for five years because I didn't want to be identified and tracked down and excommunicated once I knew they were after me and I was going to be excommunicated. In 1993, when I was in Los Angeles, I went every Sunday to LDS Church because I knew that was the last opportunity I would have to partake of the sacrament as a member of the church and to speak and to bear my testimony, which I did.

D. Michael Quinn [01:56:13] But it was the last hurrah. And I was in a ward where the bishop was very supportive and he commented about the LA Times article about my situation. He said, what's wrong with those people in Utah. And he invited me to give a fireside to his ward on women in the priesthood. So it was a great ward. It was an unusual award. And so participating in it every week that three months was. Was great.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:56:43] You've got some good leaders. All right, it's time for a lightning round. We're kind of out of time, but there's some questions I have to ask, so I'm going to give you the challenge to answer as briefly as possible.

D. Michael Quinn [01:56:55] Okay.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:56:56] One to three word answers are fine, if that's appropriate for the question. All right.

D. Michael Quinn [01:57:00] All right, you ready?

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:57:01] Some will be a little longer, but

D. Michael Quinn [01:57:03] I don't promise, but I'm ready.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:57:04] Do what you can. Favorite book that you've written?

Lightning Round: Favorite Books and Flawed Heroes

D. Michael Quinn [01:57:09] What?

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:57:09] Favorite book.

D. Michael Quinn [01:57:10] Oh, favorite book that I've written. Magic Worldview. Why it demanded the most of me. It demanded me to go beyond my comfort area in terms of my academic background. It required me to submerge myself in a worldview that was in many ways alien to my own in order to understand a worldview that was familiar to Joseph Smith. And because of that stretching of my. Of my research and my world perspective and my spiritual perspective, it was my favorite.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:57:49] Okay, that's good. It was good. Pretty sure.

D. Michael Quinn [01:57:51] Not three words.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [01:57:53] That was a longer term question. What are the biggest, most important. Name the top five discrepancies in terms of what the general membership think about church history and what the actual historical record shows. The most significant or disturbing or important ones that if you could have kind of straighten the story out, what would be the ones that you would say? We got to get straight on these things.

Top Historical Controversies in Latter-day Saint History

D. Michael Quinn [01:58:20] The first is that the experience of Joseph Smith in seeing God and Jesus Christ in the sacred grove was an unparalleled experience that no one else claimed. It was very common in published conversion narratives of Protestants who'd converted at the same kind of revival meetings that Joseph Smith had attended. Very common Ministers frequently would write, sometimes decades after their vision, they would write this as a part of describing their spiritual journey. So that's the first one to think that Joseph Smith was unique in having that experience or making that claim in the 1820s.

D. Michael Quinn [01:59:02] Another one is the claim that Mormonism is unique. This idea that a restored church can have only one similarity and that is to the ancient church. Well, in many ways, it bears no similarities to the ancient church. We have ordinances, we have officers that are not mentioned in the New Testament. We have doctrines that are not taught in the New Testament. So there's a great deal that we do not resemble in the ld in the early Christian Christian church. And there are other churches that we do resemble. Many characteristics of early Mormonism were adopted from Methodism, which Brigham Young, Joseph Smith and other leaders of the church were familiar with.

D. Michael Quinn [01:59:52] And they incorporated those kinds of things in Mormonism. So Joseph Smith's first vision was not a unique claim. Now, what emanated from that vision? Very unique in America in particular, but the claim itself, not unique. Mormonism, the LDS Church, peculiar in its own ways, but similar in other ways to both ancient Christianity as well as other contemporary Protestant churches.

D. Michael Quinn [02:00:26] Another is that but the Mormons were always persecuted because people are hateful and it was irrational and there was no basis for it. As appealing as the martyr syndrome is for anyone who's been picked on at a personal level or any group historically, usually it's more complex than that. Yes, there were people who hated Mormonism because there was an open canon, because Joseph Smith claimed there was a book that had the status of the Bible. Yes, people hated Mormons because Joseph Smith ultimately claimed that there was in print that he'd had this first vision of God and Jesus. But there was persecution also because Mormons contributed to the environment that encouraged their neighbors to regard them as enemies.

D. Michael Quinn [02:01:20] So persecution was not just one sided, it was not totally irrational, and it was not without some motivation on the part of Mormons themselves. Another is that Joseph Smith had only one intent for his succession after his death, and that was obviously Brigham Young in the quorum of the 12. In fact, he had established eight different legitimate paths for succeeding him, and he never sorted out which had priority over the other, which threw the church into chaos. Brigham Young indeed had a legitimate claim. But there were other claimants who could also argue that their claim was legitimate on the basis of Joseph Smith. So those are the five.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [02:02:09] All right, that's very good. Personal heroes within Mormonism. Name the top heroes for you.

D. Michael Quinn [02:02:16] Flawed heroes. Joseph Smith. Deeply flawed. A prophet of God who spoke with God face to face. My absolute conviction. But one who had a difficult, in some ways tormented childhood, had an adolescence that wasn't easy and was not easy as a husband to deal with. For Emma, a very human being, but nonetheless one who talked with God and who received inspiration in various ways.

D. Michael Quinn [02:02:49] My first hero, Brigham Young. My second. Not a person you would want to cross in a dark alley, but he was the savior for the existence of the LDS Church. If it hadn't been for a leader like Brigham Young, it would have been very easy. For the song that Mormon sang, I do not want A church without a prophet. A church without a prophet is not for me. That's what early Mormons sang. And suddenly the church no longer had a prophet. And if Brigham Young hadn't been the decisive, powerful leader that he was, the church would have disintegrated. With all of these legitimate avenues that Joseph Smith had established for replacing him, there would have been no Mormonism.

D. Michael Quinn [02:03:44] In 1850, maybe, but definitely by 1860, not in the kind of cohesive way that Brigham Young created in the Valleys. Next hero. Wilford Woodruff. Pardon me.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [02:04:08] We've been having you talk quite a bit today. You've been a good sport.

D. Michael Quinn [02:04:15] I choked on my own spit. It wasn't just talking. Wilford Woodruff had warned that if the church gave up polygamy, it would no longer be God's church. He'd said that publicly. It had been printed in the Journal of Discourses and the Deseret News.

D. Michael Quinn [02:04:47] And yet, when he was faced with the utter destruction of the church, he did what anyone who loved the culture and loved the church more than they loved the principles would do. And that was he was willing to sacrifice a principle and its practice in order to save the vehicle through which the principle was communicated. All the principles were communicated to the world.

D. Michael Quinn [02:05:24] So he was flawed. Yes, Wilford Woodruff was human, as all of the prophets are, from Adam to Abraham to Moses to Peter, Paul. But he bit the bullet in a way that subjected him to tremendous amount of criticism within the church and a tremendous amount of praise from people he could barely stand to acknowledge. People he regarded as evildoers praised him for something that he did only because they forced him into it.

D. Michael Quinn [02:06:03] Tremendous, some admiration for him. David O. McKay was the prophet I grew up with, even though George Albert Smith dedicated the chapel that I worshiped in, and dedicated it when I was about would have been six, six years old, almost six years old.

D. Michael Quinn [02:06:28] David O. McKay was the prophet I really remembered. And he had this disappearance that even non Mormons looked at him and felt impressed that somehow this was a man of God and he was flawed, definitely a flawed person. Something I didn't realize until I did research into his time period, which I vowed I never would because I never wanted to research anything in the contemporary history. I always wanted to stop it. At 18:30 or 32, when I expanded my study into the hierarchy, I still wanted it to not include anybody that was leading the church during my lifetime.

D. Michael Quinn [02:07:10] But I ended up getting this assignment to write a biography of J. Reuben Clark. And in the process, I found that Clark was also a Great man who was dead, deeply flawed. And that David O. McKay had his own flaws. And that just deepened my appreciation for the humanity of all the prophets, even one like David O. McKay, whom I idolized from childhood. And I wrote him when I was 10, I wrote him a letter because he was coming down to our. Near our stake. And I wrote him a letter inviting him over to our house for pancakes.

D. Michael Quinn [02:07:48] So that's somewhere in the files, which didn't do me any good later when I needed help. But nonetheless, I made that generous offer on behalf of my family. Other one I didn't know. I did not have a personal association with. With either of the Bennions. Adam S. Bennion, who was an apostle, or.

D. Michael Quinn [02:08:24] I was thinking of another word, another name for some reason. But I read what both of those men wrote, who were, I think, cousins. An apostle, one an apostle, the other a teacher in the same seminary and institute program.

D. Michael Quinn [02:08:40] And they spoke to the kind of Mormonism I understood from my readings and hearing of David O. McKay, of Hugh B. Brown. These were deeply personal views of Mormonism, not as an institution, but as a family. And that having the element, obligations to God's children throughout the world of any family, to reach out to those children who are not recognized as being part of the family and to try to encourage them to enter the fold of the family.

D. Michael Quinn [02:09:19] And those teachings by Adam S. Bennion and Lowell Bennion, David O. McKay, Hugh B. Brown, they were my heroes. And then Leonard Arrington, who I've expressed already my great admiration for. Leonard was not the kind of radical historian that I became. And even as a new member of his staff, he had to rein me in.

D. Michael Quinn [02:09:51] And yet I. I received from Leonard nothing but encouragement. And every time I published something, he would send me a letter. And this is something I should do, but I haven't to any of my colleagues over the years. Very rarely have I done this. But he would. Every time I published something, every time I gave a talk that he had heard, he wrote letters of congratulations and support to me. And after my excommunications, he was one of my devout and continued friends.

D. Michael Quinn [02:10:25] And he just remained a true friend, even though he would not have gone as far as I did. In many respects, he was more conservative as a historian, as an interpreter than I. But despite that difference, and despite sometimes shaking his head, as I'm sure he did about some the things I wrote and said, he nonetheless remained my mentor and my friend. And so I deeply admire him as a hero, not only to me, but I think A hero of modern Mormonism. I think I regard him as Mormonism's greatest historian.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [02:11:08] Give us, without explaining, just for the sake of time, give us three women that you would. You would throw in there.

D. Michael Quinn [02:11:15] Emma. Emma Smith. Well, boy, what she had to put up with with Joseph, not only from the outside in terms of being having him and their children terrorized in 1832, but also the problems that she had with him as a charismatic. Every charisma charismatic is difficult to understand by people closest to that charismatic man or woman. Charismatic man or woman. And Joseph had those problems plus the problems he introduced by living plural marriage, usually without the knowledge of his wife. And so that her courage and maintaining her devotion to him and her devotion to Mormonism, even though she split with Brigham Young. And that I think was regrettable.

D. Michael Quinn [02:12:10] It was almost inevitable and certainly understandable. She's one of my great heroines. I'd say Emma, not Emma, excuse me, Emilyn B. Wells, great Mormon feminist of the 19th century, great powerful woman in her own right. And then more to the present, I'd say Florence Smith Jacobson, who as a director of the Church Historic Sites once told the First Presidency that they would tear down a building over her dead body. And she met. And for her to be that uppity at the back of the church bus, I have enormous admiration for her.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [02:13:02] Thank you. Three last questions. The first is your third book in the series. A lot of people are asking about it. Can you just tell us quickly what its topic is and when we can talk about it?

D. Michael Quinn [02:13:14] Well, it's kind of changed over time because I've been working on this for ages. People are hearing me, tired of hearing me, those I've talked to about it. But now as I. In its most recent definition, that I think is the definition that will remain in place is that I'm studying the Mormon hierarchy with reference to LDS business and finance from 1830 to 2010.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [02:13:41] Okay. And you think it might be out

D. Michael Quinn [02:13:45] whenever I get the. The damn thing done.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [02:13:46] Okay, maybe 2012. Maybe.

D. Michael Quinn [02:13:50] Oh no, not that early. I might get it finished in 2012. I'm aiming for January. I would like, but I have to plug into the publisher's lineup of books that are maybe even better than my proposal. And so we'll see when it gets out in print.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [02:14:07] Okay. So a 30 year old male comes to you and says, michael, I've been reading your books, I've been reading other books. I've been finding all these things that are troubling and disturbing. I've been putting them on the Shelf. It seems like your work provided me with a healthy amount of things that I had to put on my shelf as well. And now my testimony is collapsed. As a believer, what would you say to someone who asks you two questions, how do I regain, or how do I regain a testimony of the restored gospel? And why did you do this to me?

D. Michael Quinn [02:14:58] Well, I would say that. And I've had actually this kind of conversation. It's not ipath hypothetical. When I've been told this in the past and even as recently as the Sunstone Conference by one or two attenders who said your book gave me the avenue and the reason to leave the church, and I've said to them and others on similar occasions, well, that's not why I wrote it. And I realized that you and others who read it could come to that conclusion, that the option of disbelief is easier for you than to continue believing in something that is difficult for you to believe in. But I said, you know, that was, first of all, not my intent.

D. Michael Quinn [02:15:48] Second of all, I don't regard my position as better than yours or as more noble than yours or as more godly than yours. Faith is a gift, and I have that. And I can't explain it, really. I just have it. It's a part of me. And after all I've been through, I don't. I mean, it's conceivable I might one day become a doubter and an atheist or an agnostic. Don't think it's likely in terms of what I've been through. And I still maintain this ardent faith. But faith is a gift. And I don't regard your lack of faith or your rejection of my faith as making you less than me or that my maintenance or maintenance of this faith that you have rejected as making me better than you. It's just I'm following my path that I find inevitable. And if you find that path inevitable, then God bless you.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [02:16:52] What if they say, how do I find it? Help me find it.

D. Michael Quinn [02:16:54] Well, I can't. I've had missionaries. I had missionaries in tears, Tell me, why do you have faith? And I fasted and prayed for a testimony, even a glimmer of a testimony. And I just had to tell them that faith is a. Is a gift. The Dr. Covenant says it is that some have the faith to believe on those who have that knowledge. And I can't explain. The easy answers don't work.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [02:17:24] Isn't that kind of a cruel God, though?

D. Michael Quinn [02:17:27] Well, it's a cruel life. Whether it's cruel for God to subject us to this life. I think we signed on knowing, at least in part what it was going to be like. And so it's a joint decision on our part, as well as heavenly fathers, heavenly mothers, in my view, we have loving parents who are eternally ours, who eternally love us, and to whom we should be eternally indebted for this life with its ups and downs.

D. Michael Quinn [02:18:09] And I've been a Mormon existentialist since I was 16, and the girl I thought I would marry, the bishop's daughter, died at 16. And I was studying existentialism at that time, and that seemed to be a perfect match. European existentialism, a perfect match. Sartre and all the others who wrote of the difficulties of life.

D. Michael Quinn [02:18:37] But I broke with them on life is futile. And in my view, life is futile only when God does not intervene. And in my view, he intervenes enough to take the edge off life's futility.

John Dehlin (Mormon Stories) [02:18:54] Maybe with. Give Michael a hand. For.

Guest [02:19:22] Come, come, ye saints. No toil nor labor fear but with joy wend your way though hard to you this journey may appear Grace shall be as your day. Tis better far for us to strive Our useless cares from us to drive to the Sanjor your hearts will swell. Oh, all is well, all is well.

Audience Q&A: Surprising Discoveries in Church History

Part 2 of 3 · Ep. 286

D. Michael Quinn [00:00:00] 1, 2, 3.

Guest [00:00:04] Come, come, ye saints. No toil nor labor fear, but with joy wend your way though hard to you this journey may appear, Grace shall be as your day.

John Dehlin [00:00:30] John I'm John Dehlin and I'm honored to be here with D. Michael Quinn and many distinguished guests. It's August 12, 2011, and we are here at a pre private dinner on a day where we're honoring the many great works and contributions of D. Michael Quinn in Mormon history and in Mormonism in general.

John Dehlin [00:00:55] And we just had a lovely meal and we're ready to jump in with questions. And so we've asked our guests to come up with some questions. We have Ann Pepper running the mic. And so we would like to open up the floor to our first questioner for Michael Quinn. We are going go ahead and raise your hand when you're ready and I'll fill the silence.

John Dehlin [00:01:22] We've asked our audience to focus on their questions right now on more historical issues and other types of issues around dates and facts and information and insight and opinion. We'll be focusing the actual conference and the interview, the Mormon Stories) interview, more on Michael's own personal story and his own personal journey, because that's what Mormon Stories) is all about. And I should mention that all this is brought to you by the Mormon Stories) podcast, the Open Stories) foundation, and Sunstone's helped out a little bit as well. So let's have our first question from Trevor.

Guest [00:01:59] Yeah, this question, I guess through all the research that you've done, could you think of maybe one single thing that you discovered, one surprise for good or for bad, that was just, I don't know, maybe the most interesting, unexpected thing that you were that you encountered in all your research.

D. Michael Quinn [00:02:21] All right.

D. Michael Quinn [00:02:21] Well, it was, I can remember the day very clearly. I went down to the basement of 47 East South Temple, which is a square, squarish, kind of Doric, I think it is Doric building that houses the general authorities. And at the time, I was a new employee of Leonard Arrington as a research assistant. And I was also a graduate student at the U.

D. Michael Quinn [00:02:52] And I had found references in the

D. Michael Quinn [00:02:56] old,

D. Michael Quinn [00:02:58] in the old catalogs of the church historian's office, references to documents that they couldn't find in the church historian's office. So somebody said, well, go down and talk with Lawrence Peterson, who was one of the old guard, which is what we called them. And they kind of embraced the term themselves of employees hired and trained by Joseph Hilding Smith when he was the church historian. And so I went down there and Asked if he knew where these documents might be. And we had a discussion about what he thought of Leonard Arrington and me and the new directions that things were going. And then I said, well, can I go over and look at those documents or in that area where you say

D. Michael Quinn [00:03:51] those documents might be?

D. Michael Quinn [00:03:52] And he said, sure. So I went over and it was a dimly lit place and it was in the recesses of the basement and I rounded a corner and there I was just drop jawed, bug eyed because stacked on the floor anywhere from 3ft to 5ft tall were just mounds of documents. And I started going through them. This is about 12:30, I think. And I emerged from my days of research and discovery about seven hours later. And among the documents I found there

D. Michael Quinn [00:04:32] were

D. Michael Quinn [00:04:34] account books of Brigham Young, the books of the giving the weight of gold that the gold missionaries had brought back from their secret mission to California to join in the gold rush and bring the gold back for the church. I found two file cabinets of B.H. roberts correspondence as well as his documents on looking at the Book of Mormon in a non traditional way. And I found minutes of the first Presidency.

D. Michael Quinn [00:05:15] It was an unbelievable kind of Christmas morning for me. And during that time every morning was Christmas morning. But this was like on speed or it was just unbelievable, the experience. I didn't tell Leonard about this because I left so late after

D. Michael Quinn [00:05:41] that. I told him the next day about this discovery and he immediately informed the archivist. Leonard was not in charge of the archives. He was in charge of the research and writing division of the historical department,

D. Michael Quinn [00:05:57] as it was called then.

D. Michael Quinn [00:05:59] And so he informed the church archivist who was then Earl Olson. And employees came down and began putting

D. Michael Quinn [00:06:08] these documents that I had discovered in boxes. And Leonard later told me that what I had discovered filled 80 cartons. So it was quite an amazing discovery. And that I would without question say that with no competitor was my major experience with discovering something that thrilled me and floored me and inspired me.

Guest [00:06:39] First of all, I'm excited to hear Earl Olson's name. I'm his niece. He passed away a few months ago. Actually, my question has to do with polygamy era in the church today. When we teach about the priesthood, we don't teach that worthiness is necessarily connected to different levels of the priesthood, just simply different keys and responsibilities. But when I've read accounts and stories of Joseph Smith entering into polygamy and encouraging women to marry him and families being encouraged to give their daughters and polygamous marriages, it's oftentimes cited a greater ability to gain salvation if one is sealed to a higher priesthood. And then, of course, when the Saints came to Utah, there are records and stories of young men and young women being sealed to different apostles as sons as a greater means by which to achieve salvation.

Guest [00:07:38] So I'm wondering if there was a historical shift in teaching that higher priesthoods maybe were destined to greater chance of salvation, or if that's doctrinally based, or if that was just something that Joseph Smith and some of our early leaders just were kind of exploring.

D. Michael Quinn [00:07:59] Well, if you're trying to distinguish Mormon doctrine from what Joseph Smith and Brigham Young taught, that's a problem, because they defined what they said as Mormon doctrine. Brigham Young, in fact, said that once his sermons were published, that they were scripture. So, pardon me, my voice goes in and out.

D. Michael Quinn [00:08:23] So

D. Michael Quinn [00:08:26] you really can't. In their minds, there was no distinction between Mormon doctrine and what they were teaching in the name of the Lord. Brigham Young was very specific that a man who had higher priesthood was entitled to women, that a man with, say, an elder was not, and that there was a very clear distinction that he made over the pulpit that there was a priority of who women should want to be sealed to.

D. Michael Quinn [00:09:11] And he claimed that his teachings on polygamy all came from Joseph Smith. So even where we're not able to identify Joseph Smith as saying that to a particular woman or a particular man, most of Brigham Young's teachings he claimed he got directly from Joseph Smith. The only distinction, or the only exception to that, I think, is his views on race, because he reversed Joseph Smith's views about race and African Americans and slavery.

D. Michael Quinn [00:09:49] But with that exception, I think we can pretty well accept that when Brigham Young said he was teaching what he was taught, that that's what he believed. And that seems to have been the teaching that Joseph Smith gave him, that there is, in fact, a priority. A man with a higher priesthood office is entitled to more wives than somebody who has not, and that women should therefore aspire to be the wives of

D. Michael Quinn [00:10:21] men with higher priesthood. Which brings up a funny little incident.

D. Michael Quinn [00:10:26] Spencer Kimball tells this story that when he was president of the church, he would regale people with stories about Hebrew C. Kimball, his grandfather. And it's amazing that somebody this close to our time was only removed two generations from that Joseph Smith period. But Spencer W. Kimball had that connection.

D. Michael Quinn [00:10:54] And even though Heber C. Kimball had about 40 wives, he was not an enthusiastic polygamist. And the story that Spencer Kimball told is that one day Heber looked out the window here in Salt Lake of his home and saw two women coming down the path or in the path from the front gate to his front door, and he went and hid in the closet and told his wife to tell them that he wasn't there.

D. Michael Quinn [00:11:26] He didn't want to have another wife. But this message had clearly been given to the people at large and to women at large. And there were young women in their 20s, even in their teen years, who expressed in their diaries and in conversations with one another that they did not want to marry an unseasoned elder. They wanted to marry someone who'd been proven through the trials of church membership and years of service, and that was the kind of husband they wanted. And if they didn't mind sharing such a man with his other wives.

Guest 1 [00:12:11] Mike, actually, I hate to say my own tell a story out of that, but it arises from what you just said. In doing some research on one of my genealogy lines, I realized how important family ties were in those days. And in one instance, a young girl in her teens was engaged to be married to a young man in his 20s. And a terrible thing happened just before the marriage, and he died. And so she was married to his father because of the importance of that family tie and ended up bearing him 13 children.

Guest 1 [00:12:47] So it happens. My question was kind of a follow up to your first comment on finding that treasure trove of documents. How exciting. My question is, was this part of the First Presidency vault? And if it wasn't, do you have a sense that any of those documents may have migrated back into that vault? And have you ever seen the documents that are in that vault?

D. Michael Quinn [00:13:14] Well, there is more than one First Presidency vault. one point, Brigham Young. Brigham Young is the one who began putting documents in a vault. And this was for fire. I mean, fires were common, and it was for protective purposes, not really secretive purposes.

D. Michael Quinn [00:13:35] Then when there were provided specific offices for the First Presidency, aside from Brigham Young's own home, then they had a vault to protect those documents, such as the minutes of the First Presidency. By the time they moved into the building, the squarish building at 47 East South Temple, they built a walk in vault, a vault. I've been in it, and my memory is that it was about the size of from that wall to that wall and maybe from the lights here to this wall, I think that was approximately the size of it. And it was entered only through the First Presidency's office.

D. Michael Quinn [00:14:27] And in that vault, there were documents originating with the First Presidency, such as their minutes and the minutes of their meetings with the 12 quorum of the 12 apostles. Then there were specially guarded documents that also were put into that location. Minutes of the council of 50, which were minutes of a theocratic organization Joseph Smith established shortly before he died.

D. Michael Quinn [00:14:57] Those minutes from 1844 to its last meeting in 1884, were kept in the, and still are kept in the First Presidency's vault. But Joseph Fielding Smith, as an apostle, was appointed church historian in 1920, and he had a vault on wheels, what would have been typical of the bank vaults of that time period, which were on wheels. And he had that in his office. And anytime he came across a document he thought was very sensational or very sensitive, he would put it in that file, in that movable roller wheel kind of safe. Well, when he became president, he'd been president of the church in January 1970. He had been church historian for 50 years and had been squirreling away documents

D. Michael Quinn [00:15:54] without keeping any record of them.

D. Michael Quinn [00:15:56] In this vault, he had no idea what was in it, just that there were things in it, some of which

D. Michael Quinn [00:16:00] he may have remembered.

D. Michael Quinn [00:16:02] And so when he moved physically his office to the office of the First Presidency, he had them wheel this movable

D. Michael Quinn [00:16:11] vault into the walk in vault of the First Presidency.

D. Michael Quinn [00:16:16] So there was a portable vault within a vault, and the secretary to the First Presidency was responsible for it, but didn't have the combination. And after Joseph Fielding Smith died, the secretary, in frustration, called down to the historical department and said that he was frustrated that he was responsible as part of his calling for this vault, but had no idea what was in it. And so at that point, it was just a few months after Joseph Fielding Smith died, there were three people who went inside the walk in vault, and one of them had the combination to the little vault and they opened it up and they did, for the very first time in 50 years, an inventory of what was in it.

D. Michael Quinn [00:17:08] And I didn't see that inventory, but I know from other references some correspondence of what was in the First Presidency's vault long before Joseph Hilding brought in his own. In addition to the council of 50 minutes, it has artifacts. It has the brown seer stone that Joseph Smith used for the Book of Mormon. It has his whitish colored seer stone, milky colored seer stone that he used for the Book of Abraham translation.

D. Michael Quinn [00:17:43] It has the journal of George Q. Cannon, the journal of Francis M. Lyman, both of whom kept very revealing journals, partly for self defense, in case they were accused of doing something that they didn't do or saying something that they didn't say. They wrote everything so they could say where they were, what they said. And what they heard, what they contributed to. And so, because those were so revealing of the inner workings of the First Presidency, and with Francis M. Lyman, he was president of the quorum of the 12, the decision was made not to allow family members to have those, but to keep them.

D. Michael Quinn [00:18:28] Once family members made the mistake of bringing it to the First Presidency, they disappeared. And very few family members were allowed to see them again. Beyond those items that I've mentioned, I really do not know what else was

D. Michael Quinn [00:18:45] in the old walk in vault of the First. First Presidency. And I know virtually nothing about what was in Joseph Fielding Smith's vault, except

D. Michael Quinn [00:18:53] he had his grandfather's temple garments in there.

D. Michael Quinn [00:18:59] So he had the temple garments of Hyrum Smith. But that's the only item that I know that he had. And that included the leaf apron from the temple ceremony that Hyrum Smith had worn in Nauvoo.

D. Michael Quinn [00:19:18] And the only reason I know that

D. Michael Quinn [00:19:19] is that it was on the probate inventory of Joseph Fielding Smith's estate. And those things were included in his vault items. No, in fact, they had all taken them off.

D. Michael Quinn [00:19:37] And it was because.

D. Michael Quinn [00:19:38] Because of the intense heat in June. The only one who kept his on was Willard Richards. And he was the only one who wasn't seriously injured or killed.

D. Michael Quinn [00:19:53] There are other vaults, and sometimes they're called the church vault. And there's a vault of the quorum of the 12, there's a vault of the 70, there's a salt Lake Temple vault, there's a law department vault, you name it. If they had documents that they thought were very important, even though they might be a subordinate kind of bureaucratic organization, they had a vault very often a walk in vault. And I've been in the vaults of the Law Department at one point when it was located in a building where it's not located. Now. I've been in the Salt Lake Temple vault as well as the First Presidency's vault and the Historical Department's vault. But being in there and seeing what's in there, two different things. And I was allowed in, but was not allowed to browse.

Guest 1 [00:20:46] Just a quick follow up. There are documents other than that you have seen and actually transcribed, but that historians today probably wouldn't.

D. Michael Quinn [00:20:55] That's correct.

D. Michael Quinn [00:20:56] Repeat the question.

D. Michael Quinn [00:20:57] The question is that I have examined and transcribed some cases verbatim, documents that are now unavailable to historians. That's true, but those transcriptions are available in the Beinecke Library of Yale University. All my research notes from that time period. I transferred to Yale when I moved to Mexico and Wasn't sure I was going to survive the adventure down there. And I didn't want them to end up like BH Roberts stuff, ended up in the basement of church. So they are open to the public. Unlike my personal papers at Yale, those are not. But the research files, including all those transcriptions, they are there. That includes minutes of the first presidency, minutes of the quorum of the 12, minutes of the council of 50 and lesser minutes.

D. Michael Quinn [00:21:57] Yes, I now have about 15 questions based on this dialogue, but I'll just go with one. You know, over the course of time, as I've read pieces of your research, pieces of other scholars research, you know, I found it somewhat liberating to see that the way the church has instituted policies and programs today, which many of us have interpreted as very rigid and somewhat in the box, but to see church history and how it played out, that it was very free flowing, things that we think are steadfast rules today weren't so much, you know, that strongly applied back in the early days of the church.

D. Michael Quinn [00:22:31] Everything from women giving priesthood blessings to what you said about the garments, they weren't as, you know, wear them every day and night. And so a lot of people have found that insight to be somewhat liberating in the sense that the rigidity we experience today wasn't always the case.

D. Michael Quinn [00:22:49] So as you look forward and see that the church is taking, albeit tiny baby steps to put out more information on the true nature of how the church came about its origins, do you foresee that as a move on the church's part to kind of put it out there? And perhaps there's a benefit they see in that same line of thinking that perhaps it will be empowering to members as opposed to, you know, a tidal wave of crisis of faith once people learn details that many of us around these tables are already aware of. I mean, what do you foresee as being the benefit that church sees in slowly but surely putting out tiny slivers of information that you initially got into?

D. Michael Quinn [00:23:31] Essentially, there was a 30 year lag between Leonard Arrington and the openness that he promoted as a historian. Although he was not the archivist, the one who opened the church archives was Howard W. Hunter. In 1970, two years before Leonard was appointed as church historian, Howard W. Hunter, as successor to Joseph Fielding Smith, wanted to meet with professional historians and get their suggestions. And because of those meetings, he opened the archives. And so when I came straight out of the army as this wide eyed graduate student at the University of Utah and was in what was then the church Historian's office. Leonard Arrington, like me, was just a researcher. I mean, he was a powerhouse of a historian, had published with Harvard, and had even at that time, I think, something on the order of a dozen

D. Michael Quinn [00:24:33] books and

D. Michael Quinn [00:24:35] scores of articles. But we were on the same footing in the sense that he had no

D. Michael Quinn [00:24:40] official position with the historical, or rather the historian's office. In 1971, when I met Leonard Arrington,

D. Michael Quinn [00:24:49] he was a researcher.

D. Michael Quinn [00:24:50] He had research assistants, and I was a research assistant as well as doing

D. Michael Quinn [00:24:54] research for my own

D. Michael Quinn [00:24:57] work as a graduate student.

D. Michael Quinn [00:25:01] The openness that he advocated ended in early 1980s, and I think you can date its resurrection with the Joseph Smith Papers project. And between those two events, the closing, so to speak, or the limiting to a very high degree of access in the church archives to that dramatic announcement of those papers, the single factor that made that announcement possible and led the leadership to choose for greater openness is the Internet.

D. Michael Quinn [00:25:51] It's impossible. And they soon found church headquarters. You could not protect teenagers from these controversies because all they had to do was plug in word of wisdom Mormonism, and they would come up with typically sensationalized material provided by Protestant evangelicals as a part of their effort to use history as a battering ram against anyone's faith in Mormonism. And I think that because the Internet is uncontrollable, there's no way to keep teenagers from. And even parental controls wouldn't control that because those are geared toward controlling other things. They're not geared unless the church comes out with its own that it'll sell through Deseret Book, it's not geared to filter out controversies in Mormonism.

D. Michael Quinn [00:26:46] I may have given them an idea, I don't know. But. So I think that the Internet has made the leadership reconsider the kind of philosophy that Leonard Arrington and many of us in his footsteps were promoting 30 years ago, that the church has nothing to lose, really, and very much to gain by giving even teenagers some grasp of the diversity, the controversies in our past.

D. Michael Quinn [00:27:22] And that openness I see moving ahead, I think because of the Internet, it won't reverse just because if it did reverse, everyone who had access to the Internet would know it. There are no longer these little secrets

D. Michael Quinn [00:27:39] that are made maintained at church headquarters.

D. Michael Quinn [00:27:43] The Internet has made this available in a dramatic way, and I think it's a great blessing. The church certainly uses it for promoting its public image, but it also has had to, as an institution, confront the

D. Michael Quinn [00:28:02] reality that they can't control information anymore and that anyone who wants to can with a Very simple. Few terms in a Google search come up with the worst kind of diatribes that could be imagined against the church. And so the best defense I think is an honest offense, which is the way they seem to be going.

Correlation, Church Finances, Polygamy, and Closing Questions

D. Michael Quinn [00:28:29] So with the church then having to confront that, do you foresee them being forced to reconsider the nature of correlation as we know it today and knew it through the 80s and 90s?

D. Michael Quinn [00:28:39] You don't use forced with regard to 47 Esau Temple. They don't acknowledge that word. I think that it's inevitable that there are going to be some changes with regard to correlation. But I used to, in the 1970s, I thought that was inevitable after only eight years of correlation. So historians aren't very good as prophets, but I do think that there are going to come changes. The diversity of Mormonism I think demands less rigid control at church headquarters over teaching instruction in multiple cultures, multiple languages. Certainly because the church is a hierarchy, there will be control, there will be oversight, there will be direction. But I think that the intern again has contributed to this. I think that the correlation will not be as tight fisted as it was in the first 30 years of its history.

Guest 2 [00:29:48] My question is similar to the previous question I was going to ask that many historians have said that we need to scrap correlation and teach the accurate history and the effect of stunting all the disaffection. You pretty much started to answer it. But is it even possible in the way that we would all like? The way I see it is if the Church just laid it out there in Sunday school, people's heads would explode. So can it be done? And should it be done, how can we.

D. Michael Quinn [00:30:25] Well, in correlations defense the Church. It's not a threat, but it's a challenge. The Church, ever since the 1960s has faced a fundamental challenge of centrifugal growth. And with that massive growth in the hinterlands of the Church, in particular in different cultures where English is not the the common language, it was a question of losing the identity of Mormonism, that it might become what the Irish Church was to Catholicism in Rome, what the French Church was to Catholicism in Rome, national churches with their own way of doing Catholicism and sometimes in opposition to the Holy See in Rome. Well, the leadership of the Church didn't want to relive that experience. And that's a major reason why correlation came into effect was to standardize the manuals, the instruction. And I've often said that, and this is unfair, but I've said it, that this is to make the general authorities

D. Michael Quinn [00:31:51] feel at home no matter where they are in the world.

D. Michael Quinn [00:31:53] But it's also to make sure that Mormonism is the same and that you don't get a Mexican version of Mormonism,

D. Michael Quinn [00:32:05] which happened in Mexico in the 1940s.

D. Michael Quinn [00:32:08] And some of those, they don't have

D. Michael Quinn [00:32:12] living memories because most of them were too young. But some of the much older men do remember that.

D. Michael Quinn [00:32:20] They remember that what was called the

D. Michael Quinn [00:32:22] Third Convention in Mexico, where they built their own chapels, they gave their own

D. Michael Quinn [00:32:28] lessons, they ran a parallel and rival

D. Michael Quinn [00:32:32] church called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints Third Convention.

D. Michael Quinn [00:32:39] So correlation is one defense against that happening.

D. Michael Quinn [00:32:43] And for that reason, I don't think they will ever give up the idea and philosophy and the engine of correlation. But I'm hoping that it will be

D. Michael Quinn [00:32:58] more

D. Michael Quinn [00:33:01] adaptable to the differences that are inevitable in the multicultures the church enters. And I don't know, it may not, because there are many people in Latin America, in Africa, in Asia, who are very happy to be Americanized and they're very happy to become a part of an American religion. Other, I think, vastly larger population in those areas do not want to be Americanized and resist the American trappings that are often attached by missionaries to the Gospel and by mission presidents.

D. Michael Quinn [00:33:52] That's a tension, and I expect that that's going to remain a tension. My hope is that correlation will loosen its grip. But like I say, historians are terrible as prophets.

Guest [00:34:08] Well, I hate to change topics. I would like to stick to correlation. I think this is a good topic we could probably discuss for the rest of the time here. My question is, I've heard a rumor, and you can confirm or deny it or not even discuss this, that you're writing a book about church finances, wondering if you might, and if you're comfortable, discuss a little bit about that book.

D. Michael Quinn [00:34:34] Very little. I'm writing what I call a third volume of my Mormon Hierarchy series. And I keep changing the direction that I'm going to. And my last decision was that a major decision was that I would cover the period of business and finance from 1830 to 2010. And that obviously leaves me a lot of holes to fill in in terms of data and evidence. And so I'm in the process of doing that research. And inshallah, as the Muslims say, I will get it done, but if not, then I won't. But that is my goal to finish that. But I don't have any details to share with you.

Guest [00:35:32] Follow up question, quick. Time frames. Do you have any time frames on potential when it might be done?

D. Michael Quinn [00:35:40] Well, my goal is January, but as I've never met a deadline I didn't

D. Michael Quinn [00:35:46] break, so I can't promise.

D. Michael Quinn [00:35:51] And I've been notorious with publishers for promising something at a particular time and being months, years beyond.

D. Michael Quinn [00:36:04] One more question. I was recently doing some reading on Brigham Young and the early days of the church in Utah. And you made a comment earlier about, you know, he used to believe, or used to say that whatever he said over the pulpit was scripture historically. Have you ever. Do you apply a rule to determine what is quote over the pulpit and what is just casual conversation? Because he's not always over the pulpit necessarily, but there's diaries, there's all sorts of sources. How do you straddle that?

D. Michael Quinn [00:36:31] Well, I, as a historian, I've been interested in any little tidbit I could find that was new to me. And so when I was taking detailed notes on diaries of the general authorities starting in 1971, when I was hired as a research assistant to do that, anything I found that was interesting, sensational, new to me, I wanted to record. And so that was the approach that I continued throughout my research career. And I would just write down anything that I found of interest with Brigham Young's sermons. I found him making off the cuff comments to his secretaries in what was recorded as Brigham Young's Office Journal, similar offhanded remarks he would make and that were recorded in what was called the Historian's office Journal. And then, of course, his sermons, which he admitted over the pulpit, were censored

D. Michael Quinn [00:37:38] before they went to press. And he said one of the occasions he said that Albert Carrington cleaned up his language, and Albert Carrington was his secretary for a period of time, then became an apostle. And what language Brother Carrington cleaned up is anyone's guess. But Brigham Young, even in the versions that we have in print that he had approved, frequently engaged in frontier humor. I mean, it's very obvious that the kind of humor we connect with Mark Twain was often going on over the pulpit in the.

D. Michael Quinn [00:38:17] In the tabernacle. And sometimes they would indicate applause or indicate laughter in the minutes that they published. But there was a lot of that going on. And exaggeration is a part of frontier humor. So whether somebody got carried away in the mood, Brigham Young included, and went beyond what Joseph Smith might have told him in the private councils of Nauvoo is anyone's guess. All we know is that Brigham claimed that everything he taught he had been originally taught in some way by Joseph Smith.

D. Michael Quinn [00:38:55] And he also claimed that when his sermons were published, they were Scripture. And you can't get around that. That was his self confidence, his claim as president of the church. And those who are uncomfortable with the things he said have to deal with the confidence with which he said them.

D. Michael Quinn [00:39:19] Next question. 1972. Leonard Arrington enters as church historian. Everybody has really high hopes for what will come. Ten years later, his picture is taken off the wall. It ends much different than the way that we all hoped it it would end. Can you tell us about what major events or revelations that he provided to us as a public that the Brethren weren't necessarily fond of? What led to that downfall?

D. Michael Quinn [00:39:50] It was right from the beginning a series of miscommunications and partial communications. And what happened typically was that the First Presidency and at that time the president of the church was Joseph Fielding Smith. In the last few months, his very vigorous counselor was Harold B. Lee. And who did not have a. I'm not. Not that they were unfriendly. But he didn't have a close relationship with Leonard Harrington as newly appointed church historian, although he told Leonard personally that he wanted a professional historian in this position. But the one that Leonard, to me at least most often talked about was N. Eldon Tanner, who was very supportive of the openness of the historical department that Leonard understood the First Presidency wanted.

D. Michael Quinn [00:40:52] But right from the very beginning, when I say the beginning, right after the move of the physical holdings of the church historian's office into the new office building, the East Wing, at that time of the church office building, right after that, Leonard obtained permission from the First Presidency to have an open house and to organize a group of supporters of the new history department.

D. Michael Quinn [00:41:28] And all of this was approved by the First Presidency. It was to be called, and was called the Friends of Mormon History. He had this opening tour. The people went through. They even walked through the vault of the for historical department. And in that vault, Earl Olson, who was the archivist, was welcoming them and greeting them as they came in and kind of just looked around at what was in there. The problem was that apparently and Leonard had no role of informing the 12, but apparently the First Presidency had not informed the quorum of the 12 that it had approved these. And as soon as word got out from those who were in attendance and began talking about what they saw as they were in the first presidencies or not, excuse me, in the historical department's walk in vault, members of the quorum of the 12 went ballistic that there was this, in their terms, violation of

D. Michael Quinn [00:42:35] security, allowing people to just willy nilly walk into the vault. Even Though the church archivist was there, he wasn't the one who got in trouble. It was Leonard who got in trouble. And repeatedly from that point forward, Leonard would get permission and authorization of the First Presidency to do something. And apparently all I can understand or believe is that they kept their own counsel and that they authorized him to do things and never informed the 12. And then the 12 felt blindsided and blamed Leonard. Because you don't blame the first presidency when you're in the 12.

D. Michael Quinn [00:43:15] And so the only one to blame is down the road. And it's easier to blame a functionary, which is how they regarded Leonard. And so Leonard was continually putting out fires of unhappiness, of disrespect, of criticism from members of the 12 who I can understand why they felt blindsided by each of these developments that they had not been informed of until they learned sometimes from the church news that Leonard was promoting. And they blamed him for being a loose cannon when he was only following very literally what he had been authorized by the First Presidency to do. And so it was a Greek tragedy almost from the beginning of the move in November 1972 into the new building. My memory is that's where it began.

D. Michael Quinn [00:44:14] Were there any specific points of history?

D. Michael Quinn [00:44:18] Well, yes. When the first major publishing achievement of the Historical Department came out, the Story of the Latter Day Saints, Ezra Taft Benson got copies or references to it from devotee in the John Birch Society that he had spying on the Historical Department, Thomas Truitt.

D. Michael Quinn [00:44:44] And so Tom was feeding him every criticism that he could about what Leonard was doing. And he went through the story of the Latter Day Saints, in a system that became very familiar to some of us, would highlight or underline the things that he found objectionable and show them to Ezra Taft Benson. And Ezra Taft Benson was not trained in history, was not really that interested in history.

D. Michael Quinn [00:45:12] And so. So the approach that he found in Story of the Latter Day Saints, even though its authors thought it was faith promoting, he saw it as critical. And one of the phrases he seized on was calling the early Christianity the Primitive Church. And he thought that was an insult to the church and did not recognize that that was a standard term out of biblical studies, religious studies for the first century or even earlier than that, the first years of Christianity, to call it the Primitive Church. And he thought that was meaning you call primitive people those who are the lesser people.

D. Michael Quinn [00:45:58] So that was one thing. He objected to the way the first vision was handled. He objected to the term communistic being used to describe the United Orders. And apparently he'd forgotten that that term was also in the official comprehensive of the Church or Comprehensive History of the Church by B.H. roberts. That was published by the Church itself as the publisher, whereas Story of the Latter Day Saints was Deseret Book as the publisher. But because of these objections, he wrote a letter shortly after the book was published and he said, there will be no second printing.

D. Michael Quinn [00:46:38] And this got back to Leonard fairly quickly. And Leonard was just crestfallen and terribly upset and didn't know how to heal. It's one thing to say I've been authorized to do this, but it's another

D. Michael Quinn [00:46:56] thing when you, the First Presidency obviously

D. Michael Quinn [00:46:59] didn't approve every word that appeared in that book. And so it became a matter of perception. And the perception on the part of Ezra Taft, Benson, Markey Peterson and Boyd

D. Michael Quinn [00:47:14] K. Packer in particular three apostles varying from senior to a junior apostle. Their perception was that Leonard was, whether he intended to or not, he was doing a disservice to the Church. And that's how they regarded him and his work and everyone who worked with him and everyone who expressed a point of view that he expressed and that included little research assistants like me. And speaking of which, I was the first one he hired outside the current employees of the historical department. I was also the one who had the shortest tenure. I was the first to leave. I was only with Leonard for 18 months. I was first hired and then going to Yale. I was the first to leave. His history division is what it was called.

Guest 3 [00:48:20] Michael, in your study of church history, have you come across anything in the teachings in the Joseph Smith period regarding anything to do touching on homosexuality or same sex marriage? And is there anything that you've seen in your study of the history or doctrine that lead you to believe that the Church could someday make a change on their policies in regards to same sex marriage?

D. Michael Quinn [00:48:41] Well, everything I have ever found in that time period of Joseph Smith I put in the book Same Sex Dynamics. And I adamantly disagree with a gay author, Mormon background, who wrote a book called out of the Bishop's Closet. And in that book, Tony Felice claimed that he had seen documents that were hidden away in the Church historian's office which referred to a male, male ceiling. That was romantic. It was similar to a marital ceiling. I have had for my time, exceptional access to the documents of the historical department. I never saw anything like that in the Journal of Discourses. Brigham Young did refer, and others referred to sealing men to men. And if you don't know what they

D. Michael Quinn [00:49:43] were referring to, you could think that

D. Michael Quinn [00:49:44] that was a marital sealing. But he was referring to adoption, which was sealing, usually a married man with

D. Michael Quinn [00:49:52] his family and his children to an

D. Michael Quinn [00:49:54] apostle as an adoption ceremony, so that this elder or high priest would be sealed to an apostle and instead of

D. Michael Quinn [00:50:06] to his own living father.

D. Michael Quinn [00:50:09] And this was a part of this

D. Michael Quinn [00:50:11] hierarchy of priesthood office that became important with polygamy. Well, it was also important in the sealing ordinance and it was more often called the law of adoption.

D. Michael Quinn [00:50:23] And that was practiced, but there was no romantic, no marital dimension to it whatsoever. Now, Joseph Smith did have very close associations with male friends. He had closer associations with females. And he was clearly, by our definitions, heterosexual. But he enjoyed the company of other men. He had close friendships. And one time, and I quote this in the book, he was out with a young man out hunting most of the day. And when the young man came back, he was being criticized for the hours that he had spent away from home. And Joseph said, oh, don't criticize him.

D. Michael Quinn [00:51:11] We're married. Well, this is the way Joseph Smith regarded relationships, that they were intensely bonded. And in fact, the last night of Joseph Smith's life, he was not with Emma. He was in the arms of a Welch member of the church, Dan Jones, and they shared the floor of the Carthage jail and fell asleep in each other's arms. And he gave a sermon about a year and a half before that where he talked about how the common practice of male friends sleeping together, speaking together, sharing in his view the, the words of the gospel in the embrace of

D. Michael Quinn [00:51:58] friendship and waking up in that embrace,

D. Michael Quinn [00:52:01] and he used that common practice as

D. Michael Quinn [00:52:04] an analog or a symbol for the resurrection. But despite that intensity of friendship, I have no evidence that he ever condoned same sex relations. And there was an accusation even during his lifetime of sodomy against one of the Higbee brothers who had been a lieutenant, I think maybe higher than a lieutenant, might have been a colonel in the Nauvoo Legion.

D. Michael Quinn [00:52:36] Under Joseph Smith's direction,

D. Michael Quinn [00:52:40] the Higbees were better known for associating with women who are not their wives. But the church political newspaper, the Wasp, which was edited by Joseph Smith's brother William, an apostle, made the accusation that Chauncey Higbee was also guilty of sodomy.

D. Michael Quinn [00:53:05] The interesting thing is that the one thing Joseph did say about Sodom, sodomy was a redefinition of what the crime of Sodom was. The traditional Protestant definition, which had been generations in print preached over the pulpit, was that it was sexual sin. And Joseph Smith said it was ingratitude. That they were inhospitable to the angels and that that was the sin of Sodom, which was very, very different from every printed spoken definition that Protestant and Catholic. But Joseph Smith was more influenced by Protestant theology and sermons.

D. Michael Quinn [00:53:53] Other than that, he didn't comment about sodomy. It didn't come up as a area of condemnation. He did comment on the sermon in terms of the sin of Sodom, and in doing that, he separated that and the punishment of Sodom from sexual behavior.

Guest 4 [00:54:16] There's a lot of current interest right now in the subject of polygamy. And the church has distanced itself from earlier positions. And I just wonder if, of course we know that we have apostles who are married to more than one woman and I presume, sealed to both of them. So would you want to comment on the history of polygamy and how that relates to the current position as you

D. Michael Quinn [00:54:45] see it, regarding polygamy?

Guest 4 [00:54:47] Regarding polygamy.

D. Michael Quinn [00:54:49] The church leadership has been embarrassed about polygamy ever since the 1920s, up until the presidency of Heber J. Grant. The first presidency did two things in their statements and over the pulpit, whether it was Wilford Woodruff or Lorenzo Snow or Joseph F. Smith, they said, this is a divine principle. It was commanded. The only reason we lived it was because God commanded it. We've given it up because God authorized us to, or in some cases they said commanded us to.

D. Michael Quinn [00:55:29] But it is a true principle, and I will say it's true until the day I die. That was the position of those three presidents after the manifesto of 1890, which was advice of the president of the church for members to live the laws of the land. Concern concerning marriage. Things changed when Hebert J. Grant became president and he was the last polygamist to become president, although both of his other wives he was married to three women, and his first wife and his second wife preceded him in death.

D. Michael Quinn [00:56:06] So when he became president of the church, he was legally married to Augusta, who had previously been a plural wife, but was now at his becoming president, his legal wife. At that same time, the quiet practice of post manifesto polygamy, which had been going on for 14 years with the

D. Michael Quinn [00:56:34] approval of the leadership of the church

D. Michael Quinn [00:56:37] for the most part, first presidency approval for the most part, there continued to

D. Michael Quinn [00:56:45] be those who were performing plural marriages without claiming the authority of the leadership of the church to do so.

D. Michael Quinn [00:56:53] They claimed a separate line of authority. Even though Joseph F. Smith had authorized

D. Michael Quinn [00:57:00] excommunication in 1910 for such people who were continuing to enter into plural marriage, he was not as personally furious about the practice, the continued practice, as was Heber J. Grant. Heber J. Grant was just livid anytime he learned about a new plural marriage and some of his closest associates were marrying plural wives in 1909 onward men that he had known and loved for years. And he felt betrayed. And then some of the advocates of plural marriage were claiming that he had married a plural wife after the manifesto, which he had wanted to do.

D. Michael Quinn [00:57:47] And he even admitted to non Mormons that he'd wanted to do that, but he hadn't. And the fact that these stories were being circulated as knowing winks and nods by people like Loren Woolley infuriated Heber J. Grant to the point that the Church's position moved from being simply denial of the right to practice plural marriage and punishment ecclesiastically to active cooperation with law enforcement to bring about the punishment of those members of the Church who had been excommunicated for living plural marriage and in some cases had moved to what was then called Short Creek, Arizona, more recently renamed Colorado City, although it's been Colorado city for about 50 years.

D. Michael Quinn [00:58:46] But it was traditionally known as Short Creek Arizona, as a outpost, God forsaken outpost. Just the people who went there, just they wanted to go where no one else wanted. I mean, Brigham Young, they wanted the top Brigham Young.

D. Michael Quinn [00:59:02] And it was a struggle for them, but they went there to live plural marriage. Most of them had been excommunicated, not all of them. And they circulated these stories of authorized

D. Michael Quinn [00:59:17] plural marriage that had occurred for 14 years and in a few cases beyond the manifesto, 17 years beyond the manifesto, 18 in one case. But those authorized exceptions were overlapping with new plural marriages that Joseph F. Smith, for example, was not authorizing. It was was a very confusing set of circumstances for members of the Church to figure out because you had authorized plural marriages occurring at the same time. Clearly unauthorized plural marriages were occurring. And the position of the First Presidency was to not deny that there were any of these plural marriages. And that of course created a gap, a gap of confidence, a gap of credibility, because many people could point to children born in marriages that had been performed by apostles up to 1904 and 05 by others after that with Presidency approval. And the fact that these were coexisting with marriages performed by patriarchs on their

D. Michael Quinn [01:00:34] own authority

D. Michael Quinn [01:00:37] was beside the point from the point of view of the First Presidency, but was an argument to continue plural marriage no matter what the First Presidency said on the part of those who wanted to live the old time religion. Well, whereas Joseph F. Smith made exceptions, a handful of exceptions after the so called second manifesto that he issued in

D. Michael Quinn [01:01:00] April 1904, Heber J.

D. Michael Quinn [01:01:02] Grant was adamantly opposed and it became a personal issue for him.

D. Michael Quinn [01:01:08] And he attacked over the pulpit those

D. Michael Quinn [01:01:11] who were continuing to live it. And they attacked him in print and made all kinds of accusations against him. And that animosity that developed in the

D. Michael Quinn [01:01:24] 1920s set the stage for the kind

D. Michael Quinn [01:01:31] of attitude that the members of the

D. Michael Quinn [01:01:35] general authorities whose names we recognize and who lived during the time that we were alive. This was the kind of conflict that they were young men in and becoming adults in and entering church leadership in. And they became almost to a man, adamantly hostile to polygamy. And from their point of view, it was counterproductive to praise polygamy as a divine revelation and then to comment about these disgusting polygamists today. And so they just commented about these disgusting polygamists and stopped saying that polygamy was a divine institution. And they referred to the section 132 as little as they could because they did not want people being attracted to the practice of polygamy.

D. Michael Quinn [01:02:31] But that was kind of impossible. The church heritage, the family heritage of so many thousands, tens of thousands by now, I think hundreds of thousands of Mormons, that heritage is interlinked with polygamy in the past. And so you have to mentally turn against your ancestors if you're going to maintain the kind of wholesale condemnation that most Mormons feel now for polygamy. And it's gone beyond the leadership. I think most Mormons feel nothing but revulsion for plural marriage today. But it had its origins. That feeling of revulsion had its origins in the 1920s with that conflict between Hebert J. Grant and those who were continuing to promote plural marriage.

Guest 4 [01:03:26] Can you say any more with reference to right now, today with say, President Monson or President President Hinckley in terms of their attitude, can you discern that or do you think it's pretty much what you've said?

D. Michael Quinn [01:03:43] Well, the general authority, the highest general authority that I had the closest relationship with was Spencer W. Kimball, who as I pointed out toward historical plural marriage, he had this combination of reverence, ancestor veneration and, and humor. But his wife was the daughter of a post manifesto polygamist. And so he also was aware of the exceptions that were made. I'm not so sure that President Benson, after him, President Hunter, President Hinckley, although I outlay laid this out for President President Hinckley in his private study during an interview. So he knew from me details. But I doubt that Thomas S. Monson is aware of this overlapping, this subterranean period of when polygamy was being both denied and authorized. I think the leaders today generally think that the manifesto was an ironclad document. And unless they have a family connection going Back to that 250 marriages that

D. Michael Quinn [01:05:08] were performed with church authority from 1890 to 1904, clearly church authority, then unless

D. Michael Quinn [01:05:16] they have a family connection, I think that pretty much they see it as.

D. Michael Quinn [01:05:20] As the wall came down in 1890

D. Michael Quinn [01:05:22] and anyone after that point was misguided, maybe faithful, maybe well intentioned, but misguided. And they would put apostles Cowley and

D. Michael Quinn [01:05:31] Taylor in that camp of misguided but well intentioned people. And they were released, and the church made a clean break by that public release.

D. Michael Quinn [01:05:44] The actual story was full, far more complex, painful, contradictory, and I doubt that

D. Michael Quinn [01:05:52] very few of or very many of the general authorities are aware of that at all. In my interview with and other interviews that I've read that

D. Michael Quinn [01:06:06] Spencer W. Kimball

D. Michael Quinn [01:06:07] had, he freely acknowledged the practice of plural marriage after the Manifesto, he would refer to his father in law as being one of those who entered plural marriage, although his wife was from the first wife, not the plural wife. When I say his Spencer Kimball's wife, Camilla, he referred to his aunts who became plural wives of prominent stake presidents and mission presidents after the manifesto. He was very open about this, but he had a personal connection to it. And I think most of the leadership of the church does not today. Some and in my extensions of power, I trace down interrelationships that the leaders in 1996 had with one another.

D. Michael Quinn [01:06:58] A number of those General authorities in 1996 had post manifesto ancestry, in some cases polygamous wives. In most cases, a man who had married a polygamous wife after the manifesto, but the general authority himself or his wife herself was descended through the first marriage, but not in all cases. So those who have the family connection, they know that things are not as publicly stated. Those who don't have that connection, I think honestly are not aware.

John Dehlin [01:07:34] So would you guys please join me in giving Michael a warm applause and thank you.

Guest [01:08:07] Come, come ye saints no toil nor labor fear but with joy Wend your way though hard to you this journey may appear Grace shall be as your day Tis better far for us to strive Our useless cares from us to drive to the San Jo Heart, hearts will swell oh, all is well, all is well.

Part Three: Final Questions, Tributes, and Reflections

Part 3 of 3 · Ep. 287

Guest [00:00:00] 1, 2, 3. Come, come, ye saints. No toil nor labor fear, but with joy wend your way Though hard to you this journey may appear, Grace shall be as your day.

John Dehlin [00:00:30] The mic is open now to any of you who would like to come up and say a few words to Michael to thank him and tell him what he means to you. Please keep your comments brief.

D. Michael Quinn [00:00:42] Have you come across in your researches any time where somebody was called into the Twelve Apostles, or any Quorum of the Seventy who has declined that call? And if so, what are the circumstances?

Guest 2 [00:00:53] I'm specifically mostly interested in modern times,

John Dehlin [00:00:56] but even the earlier church,

D. Michael Quinn [00:01:01] if I remember correctly, Reed Smoot, who was a US Senator, declined to be a counselor to Heber J. Grant. And I'm trying to think of any occasion other than that when somebody has declined the offer and I don't remember, or any others. And President Grant did not begrudge Reed Smoot that decision because Reed Smoot, he felt, was the most important Mormon in the world because of his role in the U.S. senate. He was a senior policymaker. But as I think I'm correct in that he offered that to President, or rather to Reed Smooth and Reed Smoot said he'd rather not

John Dehlin [00:02:05] I told my story a little bit before just that I thought I grew up knowing a lot about church history. But the day that I was called as a seminary teacher in Seattle, as I worked for Microsoft and decided that I wanted to be the best possible seminary teacher that I could, I stumbled onto the works of at first I started with the Institute manual, and then I went to the works of Leonard Arrington and official church history sources. But quickly I stumbled upon other resources, Fawn Brody and Juanita Brooks and Richard Bushman. And eventually I came to your works, Michael.

John Dehlin [00:02:50] And I have to say that they were challenging to read, as you said, and sometimes they caused me to almost tremble in my in my shoes, because the version of the history that I had been taught was so different from what the historical record bore.

John Dehlin [00:03:14] And I have to admit that as I read many of the books that you wrote, it was very uncomfortable and it made me very angry and it made me very sad to kind of realize that the Pollyannish life that I envisioned and the church that I had loved so much had a dark side.

John Dehlin [00:03:38] But it was important for me in a couple really significant ways. The first is that I guess as I've lived life, I've realized that that's often the way life is. And when I was holding on simultaneously to a church that I idolized and Idealized and leaders idealized. Yet I was grappling with difficult things in my own life.

John Dehlin [00:04:06] I think having that idealized view of the church and the leadership only served to make me feel worse. And I think that your faith in us to realize that we are strong enough to know the truth, one of the benefits of. Of kind of understanding better the historical record is that instead of feeling terrible for your mistakes and for a life that didn't go quite the way you planned, when you find out that Joseph and Brigham and Emma and Juanita and Fawn and David O. McKay and so many people, and you yourself, people that we would admire and respect, had many challenges and frustrations and disappointments, and we're also wonderful people, it kind of can take your defeated spirit and allow it to rise like a phoenix from the ashes, to realize that you can do good things and have a meaningful life and have bad things happen to you.

John Dehlin [00:05:18] And these people that you used to idealize are now people that you can love and respect and feel a community with that you wouldn't otherwise feel. And that's a gift that I feel like you've given me. But I think the biggest gift of all that you've given us, other than helping us know the truth, is

Guest 3 [00:05:42] being

John Dehlin [00:05:43] willing to sacrifice for what you believed in at such a tremendous personal cost. And, you know, when I started my podcast in what, 2005, I was really scared. People said, you shouldn't talk out loud. You shouldn't say these types of things. You shouldn't interview these people. You're going to get excommunicated.

John Dehlin [00:06:07] They're going to take your membership away from you. And it's 2011, and I've had a couple meetings with my bishop and a meeting with my stake president, a few meetings with my state president, but I've remained completely untouched.

John Dehlin [00:06:20] And I feel like the people that I've been able to give voice to have been able to help a lot of people work through their own challenges. And I ask myself, why is it that I haven't been bothered? And I think I know the answer. It's because people like you were willing to take the bullet and were willing to take the heat early on.

John Dehlin [00:06:47] And through the lessons of the backlash and the negativity and probably the seared consciences of those who were involved in your excommunication and others, you paved the way so that we could be here today. And I'm sure that in 1993, when that excommunication happened, it was a very dark time.

John Dehlin [00:07:12] And in some ways, the Light of what Leonard Arrington and others had tried to hold up for the world felt awfully dim. And it wasn't that light didn't come back on or gain in its brightness for many years, probably a decade or two. But I guess I just want to leave with this idea now, Michael, that, that the light that you helped light and that others like you helped to light is now burning very, very brightly.

John Dehlin [00:07:52] Your work is blessing the lives of thousands and thousands of members of the LDS Church who knew in their hearts that the record that they had been taught was inaccurate, who wanted to understand the real story. And if they were going to have a faith at all, it was going to be based, it was going to be a credible one.

John Dehlin [00:08:10] And if they weren't going to have a faith, they wanted to know what the real deal was. And I think people deserve the right to know what they're covenanting to, to know what they're committing to. I don't think that it's right for people to make promises and commitments to things when information has been withheld. And I think that's just a basic value.

John Dehlin [00:08:34] And you stood for that. You stood for that strong at a great personal sacrifice. And we are all your beneficiaries. And that is why we wanted to bring you here today. And I just wanted to thank you and give you my thanks.

D. Michael Quinn [00:08:48] Thank you.

John Dehlin [00:08:49] So thank you, Michael.

Guest 4 [00:08:53] As I've been trying to gather my thoughts, I realized that John just articulated a lot of what I was kind of thinking as well, the name D. Michael Quinn for the traditional Mormon person who knows what that name is. I think we probably know what the connotations are.

Guest 4 [00:09:13] And it's just interesting to me to see the stark contrast of what I see and biggest reason I came here tonight. You've been kind of an enigma to me to figure out, you know, and just as many people have found your literature to be destructive to their faith, I just wanted you to know that there's a lot of people who view your example and your testimony and your light as inspirational on the flip side of that coin.

Guest 4 [00:09:47] And to see somebody like you that, like John said, living the dictum, do what is right, let the consequences follow. Just a striking example of integrity. And I just greatly appreciate that and it's very inspirational to me.

D. Michael Quinn [00:10:04] So thank you.

Guest 4 [00:10:05] Thank you.

Guest 5 [00:10:08] I was very touched to hear your feelings about going to church, taking the sacrament, and I just wanted to let you know that you are not forgotten around that ordinance every Sunday when the, when the excommunications occurred in 1993, I followed the role of a. Well, I followed a friend of mine, Fred Voros, who started taking the sacrament twice every Sunday. Once for himself and once for those who had been excommunicated. How many years has that been now? Gee, 15, 16 years I've been doing the very same thing. And every single Sunday, most Sundays, I specifically mention your name when I do it.

D. Michael Quinn [00:11:03] Thank you. We are still thinking of you.

Guest 3 [00:11:06] Thank you.

Guest 5 [00:11:08] It's kind of like a ramyumptum up here. This is not what I'm used to. I haven't had many answers to prayers in my life, but I've had a few. One was when my. What I proposed to my wife. That was one grand inspiration. And another one was when I. A few months later, about a year later, when I was really struggling to know whether the church was true or not. And I climbed up Mount Olympus and, you know, it seemed like the prophetic or the thing to do, you know, climb a mountain and pray. And I did that and I was led to dialogue, which led me to Sunstone.

Guest 5 [00:11:48] And that was my answer, which was, it's not either all true or all false. There's this nice group of seekers that are. They're really seeking after truth and without compromise. And so I felt that was one of the grand answers and for me. And anyway, I went to Sunstone and I went to a session where you were talking about post manifesto polygamy. And I was like, wow, this is huge. This is big. And I was blown away by the data and. And your command of knowledge and information. I don't know if you remember, but afterwards Ru went up to a hotel room and you answered questions and I just sat there and absorbed it.

Guest 5 [00:12:30] I didn't answer any questions or ask anything, but totally blown away. But since that point in time, I've had amazing awe for you. And then last year, I decided instead to be a consumer of scholarship. I thought I ought to try to do something on my own. And so my own meager way, I wrote a Sunstone paper.

Guest 5 [00:12:53] And then when Mary Ellen informed me that you would be the respondent, I was first shocked and scared. But then I felt very honored and I was very thrilled to have you reply to that. And you know, I've always admired you and continue to do so, and I appreciate your impact in my life. Thank you.

Guest 6 [00:13:19] When I attend church here on the Unitarian church on Sundays, we call this the God box. And I can see why it's nice to be up above everybody. I lost my testimony in the church long time ago and it was. It was a fairly gradual process and involved a lot of things that didn't make a lot of sense to me. But the biggest problem was that I never had the gift of faith. I rarely felt anything that I thought was an answer to prayer. But I thought the church.

Guest 6 [00:14:04] I still felt that the church early in my life was. Was true because it made so much sense. If this was the way, if God was going to have a church, this was the one it should be. And when, I guess, starting with reading Von Brody and some other things 20 or 30 years ago, I began to question things. And eventually it became difficult for me to believe. But I kept trying as people who enjoy the church, who are deeply embedded in the church, whose families are part of the church, as I think we often tend to do.

Guest 6 [00:14:44] But what I did find, and I've come to realize really later in my life, is that the search for truth seems to lead people to the outside. And that's what it is. But what really impressed me, I mean, I grew up with the lessons of martyrs within the gospel who sacrificed greatly for belief in the gospel. But then I began to learn later on of people like Michael, like others in the September 6, and other people I found through John's community. And I. I want to take this opportunity to thank him for the great work he's done. It's really brought me here.

Guest 6 [00:15:32] But I am deeply impressed with the people that I've seen struggling against the culture but insisting on searching for truth. And I see, I think, people like that here in this building tonight, and people who are struggling to find out what really is true or not.

Guest 6 [00:15:56] We need examples, we need icons. And Brother Quinn, that's what I see you as. And Brother Dehlin, I see that the same thing with you, as people who are willing to show true integrity when the easy path would be to go along with the. The way of the church. And I really do deeply appreciate that. Thank you both very much.

D. Michael Quinn [00:16:23] Thank you.

Guest 5 [00:16:25] Okay, so I don't know if how relevant this is, and I don't know anything, but I'm wondering, given the kind of, dare I say, rigid structure, power hierarchy that we see in the church and that you've documented historically on and on, what do you see as the future of that structure, of that hierarchy?

John Dehlin [00:16:50] Is it going to change?

Guest 5 [00:16:51] Is it going to dissolve? Is it going to come to a greater recognition of what we're uncovering now or.

D. Michael Quinn [00:16:59] Well, first of all, historians aren't very good as prophets. I've said that frequently. And I need to reaffirm it. But I see the LDS Church leadership, the hierarchy, as absolutely devoted to building the kingdom in the institutional sense and blessing the saints in the rank and file sense.

D. Michael Quinn [00:17:27] And I don't think that it is fair at all for anyone to assume the worst possible motives of power or anything else that that's what motivates these men. These men are absolutely committed to God and as they understand it, the best approach that they can think of for the church.

D. Michael Quinn [00:17:55] But I do believe that there's been a rigidity that has been detrimental. And if they, in their private misgivings might regard it as detrimental as it has occurred in the past, I think that the direction that the church will take is that the leadership will become more responsive to the international needs of the church, more than just building buildings and taking flights, but giving a greater autonomy to local members to provide a kind of local flavor to the LDS Church that they experience.

D. Michael Quinn [00:18:52] And I believe that the good hearted men that these men are, for the most part, there may be exceptions, but I really think that these men have the best of intentions, that they will be increasingly aware of the lost saints that they don't reach in the way they've been trying to reach.

D. Michael Quinn [00:19:22] And these saints are lost not to God, and they shouldn't be lost to the church. But a lack of sensitivity I think has driven them to feel that they are lost. And I believe that the leadership of the church is going to be more responsive. Not perhaps everyone, but I think that there is going to be a movement of greater openness to these disfranchised members of the church who feel a love for the church and yet feel abandoned, distant, alienated to one degree or another.

D. Michael Quinn [00:20:09] And I think, I hope that the leadership will be more responsive and not assume the worst motivations for these people and not assume that it's their fault, but be willing to listen to their point of view.

Guest 3 [00:20:29] From what I can see, Michael Quinn would be considered a historian's historian. And as I've listened to everything tonight, the thought that I had is I hope that there is somewhere on this earth, I don't know where, a young historian who is going to come along and tell his own story, Michael Quinn's story in the way Michael Quinn writes history. And I hope that Michael Quinn leaves a record that becomes available and that someday, probably after some of us are gone, I'm about Michael's age, not quite, but there will be a biography of him that will move people in a way that few stories ever have. And maybe there's someone out there doing this Already, I don't know that, but that has been the thought running through my mind tonight, is this is a story that demands to be told, that should be told, and that will make a difference in many, many lives.

D. Michael Quinn [00:21:57] Michael, I just have a question for you. You were talking about like in the 70s that the Archives were open, that you had access. I was wondering where were the archives? Are these the ones that are up in the church vaults and where did you do your work and what did you have access to? And when they sealed it all up, what's no longer available? Now, the vaults that are in the Little Cottonwood Canyon, those are primarily microfilms that are kept in temperature controlled, humidity controlled, environment that is shielded because of the granite mountain that they're in from the possibility of nuclear warfare or earthquake or many other disasters, both man made and human, or, pardon me, man made and natural.

D. Michael Quinn [00:22:52] The archives that I refer to are the the records that have been kept as a sacred responsibility by the officially appointed historians of the church since the beginning. As I remember, John Whitmer was the first historian appointed and Oliver Cowdery was appointed as a historian. And in sequence there were a number down to the present. And gathering the documents of the official church, as well as personal documents, diaries and letters that relate to the church have been very important.

D. Michael Quinn [00:23:33] And that's the archives that I was introduced to as a fresh out of the army graduate student in 1971. And those were housed at the time on the third floor of what is now the church office building, 47 East South Temple. And then in November of 1972, they were moved to the east wing of the 28 story church administration building. And now they're in their own building that is on the corner of North Temple and Main Street. But Hank was just opened earlier this year and that allows many of the records that were in storage and couldn't be put in the close proximity to the researchers that those are now there.

D. Michael Quinn [00:24:30] For a period of time they were stored in the Granite Mountain vaults because they had no place else to put them. They had run out of storage space. But anyway, those are the archives that I'm referring to, referring to the ones that were maintained primarily of written records, but also artifacts and with technology, sound recordings and video recordings that relate and relate to the history of the church.

Guest 7 [00:25:03] Michael maybe it was my upbringing, but I grew up in a very orthodox practicing family, but one that we discussed everything. I was very open and I was as likely to get that. My dad had a tradition of giving us piles of books at Christmas Morning and I was likely to get as a teenager.

Guest 7 [00:25:28] Juanita Brooks, Mountain Meadows Massacre is anything else. So I just wanted to say that nothing I've read or heard from you or other of our great historians has ever shaken my faith in the institutional church. Part of that is, I mean, mainly it's just made this history rich and complex and fascinating.

Guest 7 [00:25:58] And part of that is because older in my life, I had a very profound experience of connecting with God that grounded me. But also the only thing that's really shaken me in my relationship in the church has been when I've seen people I admire and love mistreated, silenced or judged by leaders or members. But I want to tell you that you've never shaken me. You've only.

Guest 5 [00:26:45] Good.

Guest 7 [00:26:46] I've sought you out every time you've spoken at Sunstone. I've been going to Sunstone for 30 some odd years. So thank you.

D. Michael Quinn [00:26:54] Thank you, thank you.

Guest 2 [00:26:57] Well, this is kind of a fun style of testimony meeting where you occasionally ask like questions to the person sitting on the stand. And I think we should adopt that into our wards. I think that would be kind of fun.

Guest 2 [00:27:09] But I. Brother Quinn, I am actually not as familiar with your works. This afternoon I was just listening to my ipod and it happened to be that your 1995 conversation sends him. Conversation just started playing because that's the order that it was in on my podcast queue.

Guest 2 [00:27:27] And just hearing your story and the way that you honestly seek truth is something that is something that I care very much about. And so when I heard you speaking, I just jumped in the car from Provo and realized that I could make it here before it started tonight. And I'm very glad that I did. I really appreciated the thoughts that you had and the way that you conveyed them. I do believe very much in the gospel and I believe that true seeking after truth is not a destructive thing. I found John's podcast before my mission and it really helped me to change some things about my testimony before I went out.

Guest 2 [00:28:20] But I'm very grateful for anytime that I've learned something that has had a chance to shake the way that I currently view things. And I look forward to being shaken up even more because I think it is a wonderful expression of faith. So thank you very much. And I do want to ask one question, maybe if I might, about something you said about earlier tonight about putting things on the shelf. And I wonder if you could clarify because to me, that idea has always been something that you do when you're not inquiring after truth. But you've clearly demonstrated through all of your work that you're not afraid of truth. And so maybe if you might clarify how you adopt that principle and what it means to you.

D. Michael Quinn [00:29:07] All right, you're right that putting things on the shelf can be a form of denial, that you don't want to confront the issue, so you just shove it into a closet or you shove it on a shelf so that it's out of sight, out of mind.

D. Michael Quinn [00:29:27] That's not what I think Legrand Richards meant, or that's not what I think he meant. What I wanted him to be meaning was that there were some things he just couldn't sort out as much as he might try.

D. Michael Quinn [00:29:43] And when you come to the end of your ability to sort things out, rather than making a positive declaration this is true or this is false, I think philosophically, personally, it's helpful to just put things on the shelf so that they don't have to be a crisis for you or they don't have to be an obligation to say this is false or this is true.

D. Michael Quinn [00:30:14] And I personally have done my best to explore every nook and cranny of Mormonism, but there are things that disturb me. For example, the doctrine of blood atonement, which was preached from the pulpit, published in the Desert News and in the Journal of Discourses for the benefit of British saints and people living on the East Coast.

D. Michael Quinn [00:30:47] It turns my blood cold. I mean, using mixed metaphors, but it just does not settle well with me. And yet it's a doctrine that I can trace to Joseph Smith. He began the teaching that revolves around that doctrine. Brigham Young refined it, but certainly did not invent it.

D. Michael Quinn [00:31:14] And I find it difficult to feel comfortable with. I often say that I'm a 19th century Mormon without the violence and without blood atonement, because I don't endorse either one. And I think I understand it very well in terms of what they said.

D. Michael Quinn [00:31:37] I don't see why it needs to be a part of the gospel that I should believe in. And so I'm not condemning them for teaching it. I just think it had unfortunate consequences, even if they were convinced it was a godly doctrine.

D. Michael Quinn [00:31:56] So that's how I handle putting things on the shelf. I know you said before, Michael, that you hadn't been to the archives since 1986. You quit researching there. Oh, no, that's. That. If I was understood as saying that, that's not Quite true. In 1986, there was a new form that they required all researchers to sign, which gave the Church the right to review anything before the person published it that they had researched at any time in the church archives. And I said I would sign that with a handwritten note from this time forward that I looked at, but I wouldn't allow that to apply to things I signed or rather researched in the past.

D. Michael Quinn [00:32:43] And they said, you have to sign it as is. And I refused to. Then around 1991, they changed that form. I heard that they had changed it, but I didn't have a need, a pressing need to go back to the archives. So I didn't until 1997 when I was preparing to do this revision, this expansion of the Early Mormonism and Magic World Book. And at that time, there were things I knew I needed to look at in the archives that I had learned were there since I last did research.

D. Michael Quinn [00:33:20] I went to the archives and on the spur of the moment, I just asked if I could be admitted. And within 10 minutes they gave me permission. And so I have. There's a form that you have to sign and be approved to do research, I think, on an annual basis now. And I have done that over the years, but I have on and off been doing research at the archives since 1997. And what are your thoughts towards the new perceived openness of the church archives under Elder Jensen with, like the Joseph Smith Papers? Is there anything that excites you about Mormon studies at all? Oh, yes.

D. Michael Quinn [00:33:57] And I think that the publication of this series on the volume on Joseph Smith as a remarkable demonstration of the leadership's confidence that the membership of the church is not going to be startled or disturbed or detrimentally affected by any controversies that happen to be in the documents that they find and present, whether they're legal documents or whatever.

D. Michael Quinn [00:34:27] But not everything that was available under Howard W. Hunter as church historian. When I first came into the research at the Church Historian's office, not everything is available now that was available then. Much has been made more available.

D. Michael Quinn [00:34:48] Some restrictions that were in place in the 1980s have been lifted or been modified. I think that's very positive. And I'm pleased at the directions that I see what's now the LDS Church History Library going. I can only applaud them.

John Dehlin [00:35:07] Thanks, everyone for being with us. And special, I don't really know how to articulate the feelings I have, not just for Michael, but all of the people like him who have the courage to stand up for what they really believe in and say it from their heart and write it and mean it and not back down. So thanks, Michael, for doing that for us and setting that Example.

D. Michael Quinn [00:35:39] Thank you.

John Dehlin [00:35:41] Everyone. Stand. Stand. Do a hand.

D. Michael Quinn [00:35:47] Thank you. Thank you,

Guest 8 [00:36:02] Our Father in Heaven. We're grateful for the chance to come together tonight. Grateful for the many hands and the loving hearts that conceived of this and made it happen. We're mostly grateful this night, though, for the crazy combination of qualities that's Michael Quinn. Stubbornness and faith, tenacity and courage, his sexuality and all the things that have made him such a compassionate person and such a wonderful truth teller. Grateful for the way that he's consecrated these gifts and these different things that are part of him in service of Thee, in service of truth and his gifts to all of us. We're so grateful that we've been able to both hear from him and meet him better tonight. Also share our love back for him.

D. Michael Quinn [00:37:06] Gratitude.

Guest 8 [00:37:09] We all came here for different reasons. We're in our struggles. We're in our wrestles with Thee, with ourselves, with our past, with different things. And on nights like this, when we're feeling tender, we pray that whatever it is that we came here tonight, we'll latch onto that and we'll turn it over in our hearts, and we'll be able to get a little closer to peace. And then we'll keep coming back, and we'll keep coming back. And we know that there'll be a blessing at the end of all this. Again, we thank thee for this evening. We're thankful for John, thankful for the Open Stories) Foundation. All the different events, conversations, help us drive home this night safely. And we say these things in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

Guest [00:38:31] Come, come, ye saints no toil nor labor fear but with joy Wend your way though hard to you this journey may appear Grace shall be as your day Tis better far for us to strive Our useless cares from us to drive to the San Jo your hearts will swell oh, all is well Always.

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