The September Six and Boyd K. Packer

Elbert Peck [00:00:19] Before I should tell one more story before, before that, September 6th, before Daniel left, he'd run into Elder Packer in the parking lot. Elder Packer had run into his father in the parking lot but argued with Hartman Richter Jr. For not controlling his son more and getting him to quit Sunstone. And then I guess elder Hartman Rector Jr. Had had a conversation with Elder Oaks about this also.

Elbert Peck [00:00:45] So Daniel got mad because he felt, why are these people getting on my dad? My dad doesn't have. I'm an adult, my dad doesn't control me. So he called Elder Oaks and asked for an audience with Elder Oaks. This is after the alternate voices talk. So it's maybe 90, maybe 90, 91, maybe I'm getting all these years wrong, but it doesn't matter.

Elbert Peck [00:01:08] So Daniel goes and has his audience with Elder Oaks. And it's very interesting. Elder Oaks had taken the current symposium program and had categorized everything as, as non theological or non religious, something like environmentalism or something. And then for all the others he had a spectrum from apostasy to questionable to this to this to innocuous and spread them out.

Elbert Peck [00:01:39] And for a while, Elder Packer came in and joined the conversation with Daniel and Elder Oaks. But Daniel, both of them were pretty, were pretty clear that on the far right of the spectrum, the far end of the spectrum was talking about the temple. That is the most radioactive thing you can do. And they said any discussion of the temple, any discussion of the temple is off limits. And then theology was the next category. And theology is really a questionable project unless you're teaching the official theology of the church. And then they went on to history and other things. And when they were talking about theology, according to Daniel, Elder Packer said, well, that's what their really agenda is.

Elbert Peck [00:02:21] They want to change the theology of the church. And so I think they clearly see, whereas certainly Daniel and I and most people, maybe most people at Sinson felt that this was a discussion group. They clearly saw it as an advocacy group trying to tell the Brethren how to run the church and how it should be changed. So they were very defensive about that. So they issued the statement on symposia, which brought a lot of response. Gene England and Ed Kimball at BYU wrote a letter explaining how that wasn't the statement wasn't really about sunstone because sunstone doesn't do the things that they list in the statement and published it in the daily universe at byu, which I'm sure made the Brethren furious at Gene.

Elbert Peck [00:03:06] And it became harder after that to get subscribers became harder. And some People canceled, but not many. To cancel a subscription requires an active act. And most humans are, like ourselves, lazy. They don't cancel a subscription. They just don't renew when it comes around.

Elbert Peck [00:03:31] And so renewals started to drop off after that. And it was harder to get the BYU people who we really liked, partly because they were academics and they raised our level of discourse as well as being moderates. And the year right after the symposium, there were a lot of academics who were mad at the statement on symposia who girded up their loins and said, they can't do this. Sign me up to speak. This year. There were just a lot of heroics of faculty who would call and insisted to be in the symposium that year.

Elbert Peck [00:04:04] That was nice, but that didn't last long. It just became a hard battle. The sociology department at BYU once issued a letter from the whole department defending their participation in Sunstone because they thought it was good. But then a year or two later, when they had two empty vacancies in the department and neither of their candidates were accepted by the board of trustees, and they were told, well, we're basically punishing you for a Sunstone. And so the people who didn't participate in Sunstone really got on the case of the faculty who did and said, you're just killing our department. We've got to be able to hire people and stuff like this.

Elbert Peck [00:04:43] And so there were a lot of really hard institutional processes at BYU that made even the tenured, even most tenured people, feel like it just wasn't worth the hassle of speaking at Sunstone. And anyone who didn't have tenure, that was like death. And later it really became part of the review process. You wouldn't even be given a slot at BYU if you'd spoken at Sunstone, or you really had to show make a huge argument why you should be hired. So BYU pretty well dried up, and also some mainstream Mormons.

Elbert Peck [00:05:24] To do something at Sunstone, to cross the line and say, I'll participate in Sunstone, was always an affirmative act. But the emotional, social, theological, institutional threshold of doing it was pretty low. And it didn't require a huge step to do that. But afterwards, you were almost making a statement about who you are receiving the church. And so it was a huger wall to cross to do something with Sunstone. And for most people, it's just not worth even that internal emotional hassle, or maybe the hassle with your spouse or your job. Some people told me who'd spoken years at Sunstone, I like Sunstone. I want it to continue, but I'm online to be a mission president in a year or two and I don't want to ruin that chance.

Elbert Peck [00:06:13] I can't really blame them for making that kind of choice. But in the process, the breadth of the symposium narrowed and the number of subscribers to the magazine narrowed and the number of people who left who were angry at what was happening increased. So you had the organizations like, What's the organization Lavina?

John Dehlin [00:06:45] The one about abuse.

Elbert Peck [00:06:47] Yeah, but organizational abuse, it's kind of like the aclu. It'll come to me. Shows you how far I pinned from all of this sort of stuff. So they rose up and presented more and more papers. And so the discussion, which had a defensive tone to it all of defending our right to speak and defending this sort of would come up. And those were hard times. We lost a lot of support.

Elbert Peck [00:07:12] And in the end, the Brethren won. They certainly achieved what they wanted. They knocked Sunstone off of a growth model. And I think perhaps this was inevitable in some way. Certainly the details of the September 6th, the people being called into the excommunications, which was in 93, I guess the state. My symposium came in 91, 93.

Elbert Peck [00:07:47] That was a hard time. That was the symposium again. And there I don't think you had a whole joint statement, a decision from the Brethren of what to do. I think you had primarily Elder Packer deciding, well, they still haven't learned their lesson from the statement on symposia. But things start downhill after the statement on symposia. So we need to really show these people that there is a line and some of them have crossed it. So they picked out those people.

Elbert Peck [00:08:16] Some of them were for symposium things, some of them for articles that they had in the newspaper, quotes that they said in the newspaper. Some were just generally about there are their involvement. But one by one, person got called in for court.

Elbert Peck [00:08:34] And here again, see, the church is not happy with independent voices, whether you're conservative or liberal, because Avraham Gileadi, he's a personal friend. He was a personal friend of mine and I'd had him speak at Sunstone on occasion. But he's not a Sunstone kind of person at all. He's a very conservative theologian. I don't. I personally don't agree with his theology, but he was slapped because they didn't like his very conservative interpretation of Isaiah.

John Dehlin [00:09:02] Who were the others and why were they. Who were the others sept 6th and why were they.

Elbert Peck [00:09:07] I think Lynn Whitesides, who had been a chair of the Symposium for years. I think it was for some statements she said about women in a Tribune article. Maxine Hanks, I don't know the particular thing but she, she said many incendiary comments in the newspaper as well as at the symposium.

John Dehlin [00:09:26] Her book on women in authority.

Elbert Peck [00:09:28] I don't think she was excommunicated for that book. That had been out for quite a while. But she was very much an advocate and almost an agitator like in the Mormon Women's Forum and some other things. Margaret Toscano for her theology. Lavina for her chronicling of the organizational abuses of the church. Michael Quinn for his statements on the church which were at the recent symposium. Oh, and that we published an article earlier about that same time by him in the magazine. What was that article about?

John Dehlin [00:10:03] Post manifesto polygamy?

Elbert Peck [00:10:05] No, that was early on. That was dialogue. That was ten years before that.

John Dehlin [00:10:11] Spiritual gifts for women and that whole deal.

Elbert Peck [00:10:15] I can't remember what it was on. But with Quinn we published other articles. We published his article on baseball baptisms which is a hard hitting history of the church in England in the early 60s.

John Dehlin [00:10:33] His magic and folk magic stuff.

Elbert Peck [00:10:36] Yeah, they've been earlier but the church didn't like that either. And they certainly didn't like his hierarchy books. And there are plenty of things by Michael Quinn that I'm sure. And by this time they'd already forced him out of BYU and they were just now telling him enough is enough. We don't want you to have the imprimatur of being a leading member of the church. You can be a believing non member.

Elbert Peck [00:11:01] All those people who got their notices and we heard about them one by one. Oh of course, Paul Toscano, which he his articles often about power and the church became increasingly strident and harsh about the brethren. So they all got their articles one by one and that was a hell of a month. Lynn Whiteside's court was first and we met, it was in the avenues and we met at the chapel and we're on the street and we had all these candles that we put on this little retaining wall. It's got wax all over it and we spent the night singing hymns as someone would go in and out of the church to find out what was happening with her trial.

Elbert Peck [00:11:47] Eventually she was disfellowshipped. Michael Quinn and Maxine Hanks chose not to go to their courts. So we didn't have vigils for them. Lavina wasn't going to go to her court, but she scheduled a little faith service vigil, not at the time of her excommunication. It was at the White Chapel, up across the street from the state Capitol. They rented it, and we all went into that, and she had all these speakers, and we sang tons of hymns.

Elbert Peck [00:12:17] And it was quite an electric evening. Highly charged and very passionate. People sing. I mean, never heard people sing hymns with such gusto. And then Paul's Court at his Stake center in Holiday there. The church by then had become more accommodating. They allowed us to run an extension court out into the parking lot, and the court went on for the longest time, and there was an electronic piano there, and Ardine Watts pounded out hymns while everyone sang them with gusto. And. And people would come and bring donuts. And it was kind of a fun, bittersweet, dark comedy of a night while we waited to hear.

Elbert Peck [00:13:03] And eventually it took so long, people went home, and then they came back in the morning, still waiting to hear the results of the Politus Conway excommunication. But it ground everyone down. I mean, whoever thought you'd be standing holding vigils in church parking lots? And. And the singing of the hymns took a bittersweet tone on those nights. And were we protesting the church, or were we just having solidarity with Michael Quinn, with Paul Toscano? You know, it was a fuzzy line. I remember writing about the ambivalence in the magazine and then getting this letter from Scott Card saying that he never could do anything for Sunstone anymore as long as excommunicates would speak at Sunstone like Lavina.

Elbert Peck [00:13:48] And he. He lamented that I was protesting my church in a parking lot. Then a few years after that, symposiums were very hard to recruit people for. People became weary of Mormon studies a lot in the Sunstone group, and many of them probably already were on a journey that would eventually take them outside of Mormonism. That's a very common journey of intellectuals in any religious tradition. And this accelerated that journey for a lot of people. So a lot of the regulars no longer cared. So you call them to even introduce people, and they go, oh, I'm tired of all this. I'm not going to the symposium.

Elbert Peck [00:14:37] So you couldn't recruit new people to be in Sunstone. The threshold was now so high. New people just like, I don't want to do that. And. And the old regulars were either tired or weary, or many of the people were just protecting their jobs at BYU or just not wanting to be part of it. And there were some who said, I think the brethren are right. I think this has gone too far and they'd go back to more mainstream Mormonism. But all of those trajectories reduced the pool of people who were doing Sunstone. Those were very, very, very difficult years.

Financial Struggles and the Decline of Sunstone

Elbert Peck [00:15:17] And they were compounded by the fact that Sunstone's finances were again in the toilet when Daniel left after his five years. He left in 91 or something like that. He left right after, shortly after the state run symposia, or a year after that.

Elbert Peck [00:15:37] Sunstone was flush and totally out of debt. Paid off all the debts we inherited from Peggy, which maybe were like $200,000 if you had them all up. It was a lot of money. The last of them were a $5,000 debt here and a $10,000 debt here. Daniel would, he was so incredible on the phone negotiating with people. We'd owe them $15,000 and he'd say, well, I can pay you 3,000 now, or you'll just have to wait. And you may have to wait forever. And they'd really bargain them down to almost nothing to pay off the debts. But we'd hired a publisher who wasn't really fit for the job.

Elbert Peck [00:16:18] She's an incredibly wonderful person, great skills, but this wasn't her job. And after her year, we were back in debt, owing tons of money to the IRS again and owing a bunch of other money. And when she left, we didn't have any money to hire a new publisher. So I ended up doing the one thing I said I'd never do when Peggy offered me the job. I was editor and publisher because we didn't have any money to hire anyone.

Elbert Peck [00:16:47] And that was sort of the beginning of my emotional decline. I was energetic for those first few years, worked myself hard to pay off the IRS debt. And then we discovered not only did we owe maybe 40, $50,000 to the IRS, but she hadn't paid the hotel bill from the last symposium. And they wouldn't let us sign up for the. They wouldn't let us hold the symposium the next year until we paid off the old one. And I had to pay the next year's symposium in advance. So while I'm paying off the irs, I have to pay two years of symposium and I have no money.

Elbert Peck [00:17:23] But I did have a Sunstone American Express card. So sometimes I would like pay the IRS with American Express card, which would hold me for a month, and then I'd have to raise $10,000 to pay it off for the next month's so then I could charge $10,000 more to the IRS. And eventually that little ponzi game switching bait to just hold everyone at bay for a year or two.

Elbert Peck [00:17:47] I wasn't able to make my payment to American Express for a couple months. Eventually I did, so they canceled our card and I had this huge negative credit rating. But we made it through. So it was unfortunate that we were really in a tight ship when 1993 came around again. And that was to have to dig ourselves out a second time was just very, very hard.

Elbert Peck [00:18:16] And with so many people who would personally express me goodwill but not be willing or able or want to do anything with Sunstone, that was very difficult.

John Dehlin [00:18:29] Tell us about learning about Daniel's Peasant.

Elbert Peck [00:18:32] Well, once again, I was at a family beach trip in August in North Carolina.

John Dehlin [00:18:38] Tell me about what year

Elbert Peck [00:18:42] I had left Sunstone. So maybe it was 2002 or maybe the summer of 2001. 2001 or 2002. Once again, Peggy Fletcher calls me for a quote, for a news story, and she's the one who tells me Daniel has died.

Elbert Peck [00:19:02] That was very hard because Daniel was such a force of life. He greeted whatever he greeted was with wholeheartedness and massive energy. I remember biking with him once. I was kind of a lazy, casual biker, and he said, let's go on a bike trip once. And as Pat Bagley once said, Daniel's idea is fun. It's like going up a 90 degree wall on your bike. He was just energy, and he loved outdoors. He'd go skiing with his son and dog up Mill Creek Canyon every Sunday morning. That sort of became his church during the last few years of his life. And he loves to go mountain climbing and all sorts of outdoor activities.

Elbert Peck [00:19:43] And he was doing, I guess, an activity that was a little too extreme for his ability or a foolhardy. He was climbing with a person up a cliff, as I understand it, that was very steep. This person who he was with was a very experienced climber, but who also liked to push things to the envelope. And Daniel was following him. And apparently that person just heard a oh, and then that's all. Daniel fell and died in the fall off the cliff.

Elbert Peck [00:20:20] He has a beautiful wife, Lisa, and they basically had two families. They had two children early on, and then they had two children. It was a decade in between the first group and the second group. That was very hard. I saw him in the parking lot at the symposium just before he died. And we spoke for like an hour, hour and a half. I think it was 2002, just standing in the parking lot. It was really a great conversation. And then he was gone in a couple of weeks.

Elbert Peck [00:20:52] That's how Daniel died. But he was living life to the fullest. Or a little over the top, but great guy. You'd hate him to dim his light and live a longer life. So dim. But damn it, you wish you'd been just a little more careful.

Reflecting on the Legacy of Sunstone

John Dehlin [00:21:11] So as you look back now, are you proud of your time at Sunstone? Do you look back at it with joy? How do you feel upon reflection, both personally and for the church about your contributions, yours and Dana's contributions?

Elbert Peck [00:21:27] Personally, it was a great time. You know, it was often very hard work and long hours, lonely nights in dark rooms working at computers and stuff. But it was such a rich time. I'm kind of a little intellectual and I'm a generalist. And so Sunstone allowed me to dabble intellectually in all sorts of disciplines, from sociology to literature to history to anthropology. As you edit this and network with these people, I met so many great people and so many rich friendships and just wonderful souls who really cared passionately about things. And I mean, what a great job. I like a creative side, and the magazine allowed some creativity.

Elbert Peck [00:22:12] And the pulling together of a magazine and particularly a symposium is not just a logistical and organizational task, but there's a creative side of who would be the best respondent to this paper. And you try to identify, find just the right person from a different discipline who could put a different light on it. That's such a fun, creative thing. And you take the joy and the miracle that happens when those two people do things, and you're really just the behind the scenes person. But that was great. I loved doing all that, made great friends and worked hard, and it was fun intellectually.

Elbert Peck [00:22:49] My journey, my religious, spiritual journey, while I was a lot more Mormon at the beginning than I am now or was at the end, journeyed through that. And in that process, I sort of paralleled Sunstone altogether, which causes, I think, some of the tensions in Sunstone. Now. If you look at the Sunstone that Scott Kenney organized and the people who were there at Scott Kenny's day, and even in the early Peggy days, they were all true believers from byu and they were looking. When they say they want to do arts, they want to have arts that celebrate and explore Mormonism and history, that celebrates and explore Mormonism and the sort of.

Elbert Peck [00:23:28] And those people at that time would have never considered publishing many things by excommunicated Mormons or things that would undermine the faith. But they wanted critical studies and the trajectory of all those people and all many other people who joined in that path have come now. So you have a very diverse sunstone. You have sunstone made up of people who are true believers and go to church and pay tithing and go to the temple, people who sure believe but are not very active and people who are cultural Mormons and people who are post Mormon or non Mormon or ex Mormons. And you want to bring in the non Mormon scholars.

Elbert Peck [00:24:06] And it's such a diverse group. And as Art Bassett once said in an article he wrote, how much tolerance can we tolerate? This is a much more diverse group. I came to see it and, and I'm sure as all politics is personal, so all philosophy is, I came to see this as sunstone as an open forum, which I base that on the discussion of open forum in current American politics, which is you have a place where people come and talk and you want honest discussions from everyone who's interested in this conversation, whether they be non Mormon scholars or believing Mormons, this sort of stuff. And if they're civil and kind and respectful and want to pursue knowledge and stuff, then things can happen here.

Elbert Peck [00:24:57] And I would make the argument that even a true believing Mormon believes that that sort of space is healthy, even though they're making space for people who aren't believing or almost who are atheistic. And Gene England really came to tag on that like, yes, that's what we want and the ideal. I think that's what Sunstone should be.

Elbert Peck [00:25:17] I don't really think it's possible for one organization to be an open forum. Maybe it's possible for one country to be an open forum, but some people like the Nation magazine and others like the National Review, and they're going to go to ones they like. It's really hard to get those kind of people to talk together in the Gene England ideal. And they're not going to like it people and they're going to be excommunicating each other within the larger national forum. And one organization can't do that all. And I experienced that dynamic all the time during the first half of my 15 year tenure at BYU.

Elbert Peck [00:25:50] I went down to BYU every week like I did at 70s press, and would roam the halls and drop in on faculty and just really immerse myself. And I became, I was surprised initially at how parochial even our best academics can be. People would say to me, you know that person over there in the English department, they don't understand things and they're wrong when they write about that, they're wrong about that. And they're really almost apostate and we use such strong terms, and they'd say, but.

Elbert Peck [00:26:22] But when it comes to this area, their area of discipline, the church is wrong and need to correct it. And so many people see, except for the area in which they think about carefully, everything else being okay in the church, you know, which was a very interesting dynamic.

Elbert Peck [00:26:36] Related to that is everyone draws the line of appropriateness just on the other side of where they are. You know, like that card, that's fine, but this is off limits. It's sort of right where they are. So they have a hard time tolerating someone who they see as on the other side. And there's always that kind of finger pointing and judgment going on. Very few people who would embrace them all. I guess the people who were so embracing of different views became my heroes, the Gene Englands and the Bonariches.

Elbert Peck [00:27:07] They had a lot more tolerance for that. But organizations get their vitality and maintain their strength in life because a group of people are committed to what that organization is about and they push it forward. And usually it's because they have a little cause aspect. I didn't like seeing some sort of advocacy of certain causes. We'd allow advocates to speak within our forum, but the only thing Sunstone was an advocate for was an open, honest forum of civil discussion by responsible and thoughtful voices.

Elbert Peck [00:27:39] And actually there aren't that many people who are committed to that idea. It's such an abstract idea. Most people are committed to their hobby horse, whether it be gay rights or feminist issues or even Mormon history or something like that. A hard dynamic. And I don't know where Sunstone's going to go with those issues in this new Internet age.

John Dehlin [00:28:03] Do you think if you were to give your best pitch for a continuing need for a place like Sunstone, what would you say today?

Elbert Peck [00:28:17] I think it's the job of an editor. Well, there's two needs. Everyone craves community. And one of the things that Sunstone gives, particularly through the symposium and people attending the symposium and now, I guess through Internet connections, is that connection with a person, with an individual, and you like being with them or you like talking to them online. And Sunstone helps provide that need. And that's an essential part of any sort of thing.

Elbert Peck [00:28:45] But the other part is, I would say, I guess I use the word editor. And by that I mean, like, there's a lot of words out there in this world. And I take the New Yorker magazine because I know that the editors have discriminating tastes and they may not print everything I would want to read, but usually what they print is something that I would be comfortable reading because it's rigorous in its thought, or it's good fiction, or it's good poetry, or it's thoughtful. This. So the editor is the filter. And, you know, anyone who's tried to look up anything on Google knows the task, overwhelming task, of saying, oh, there are 30 million pages about this topic.

Elbert Peck [00:29:32] You know, I just want something that's of quality, you know, and if Sunstone, as magazine, good magazine editors do, becomes a filter so that, you know that if I want to find something else, if I go to Sunstone, there's a filter. I don't just have someone's offhanded blog and I don't have something. Whatever is through the sunstone and perimeter is filtered and it's of quality of thought. And maybe if it's a controversial topic, it will provide me quality of thoughts, a plurality of different perspectives that are all thoughtful, that help me sort of see the thing from many different perspectives. And it's a shorthand. You know, you go to Wikipedia, but you wince because you're not sure whether it's right or not.

Elbert Peck [00:30:19] Which is why I wish Encyclo Britannica were online free, because they referee and judge. Sunstone in the Internet age, I think, needs to be that kind of filter and editor. And so when you enter it, you enter a thoughtful conversation. I know that's hard to do because to make those things work, you want to be interactive.

Elbert Peck [00:30:48] And if you're being interactive, then you allow a lot of voices and comments and you get a lot of dumb comments. But there must be a way to allow people to go to the quality and still allow interactive conversation.

Elbert Peck [00:31:01] But that's the role of an organization like Sunstone is a filter as well as an axis and points you to things that you want to find out.

Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.