Introduction and Guest Background

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I am your host for today, John Dehlin. It is October 4, 2023, and today we are so incredibly excited to be covering a new book by Signature Books that has been released and is now being talked about all throughout the Mormon circles. The book is called the September 6th and the Struggle for the Soul of Mormonism by Dr. Sarah M. Patterson. For those who don't know what the September Six is, in September of 1993, when I was a senior at BYU, six Mormon intellectuals were either excommunicated or disfellowshipped, kind of all in the same month. And I may be getting details wrong, but it was for publishing and discussing issues like feminism and other sorts of things that the brethren didn't like. And it was a really formative moment for me. But it was more importantly a really big moment in Mormonism and especially in Mormon studies, Mormon scholarship and Mormon culture, Mormon intellectual culture, I would say. And you've probably heard me discuss the September 6th hundreds of times on Mormon Stories podcast. We've interviewed Paul Toscano, one of the September 6th, Andy Michael Quinn a few times, and also Margaret Toscano, who is considered to be by some to be a part of this group of scholars who was also punished, and Brett Metcalfe, too, again, someone who is kind of grouped in this purge, as some like to call it, that happened, let's just say, between 1992 and 1994ish. But recently, after the Amazing Barbara Brown took over Signature Books and she was working on some amazing books related to D. Michael Quinn, including a new biography that's coming out, a memoir that's coming out. I should know the difference between a memoir and a biography. But she realized that we needed a good book on the September 6th, and she wanted someone who could take a journalistic approach, but who is an academic and who could write it in a year less. And she turned to you, Sarah Patterson, and we are just delighted to have you on Mormon Stories podcast.

Sara Patterson [00:02:23] Thank you for having me.

John Dehlin [00:02:26] Okay, so I'm going to guess that a lot of my audience, maybe this is the first time they've seen you or heard your voice. So would you mind telling us just a bit about yourself, just kind of by way of introduction?

Sara Patterson [00:02:40] Sure. I teach at Hanover College in Southern Indiana in and I teach theological studies and gender studies there. My doctorate is in US History, but I've always been interested in religious history. And so Mormonism and the movements that came out of Joseph Smith have always been an interest of mine because they tap into so many important trends in American religious history.

John Dehlin [00:03:14] Yeah. And so a couple of the types of books or articles that you've published prior to this include

Sara Patterson [00:03:26] my last book is called Pioneers in the Attic Place and Memory along the Mormon Trail. So I'm interested in how people create historical memory about particular times and spaces and in this case, the Mormon Trail. I've also written about gender and sexuality in Mormonism and including Mormon masculinity.

John Dehlin [00:03:51] Excellent. Okay, well, we're so grateful to have you. And today we're going to just talk about some historical context in the Mormon Church that kind of led to the September 6th. We're going to talk about all the different characters involved, maybe talk a bit about the aftermath and how its legacy lives on today as it relates to the. As you write, the Struggle for the Soul of Mormonism. That's a great title.

Sara Patterson [00:04:23] Thank you.

John Dehlin [00:04:24] I'm guessing the publishers reserve the right to name the book, Is that right?

Sara Patterson [00:04:31] They do, but I came up with the title.

John Dehlin [00:04:34] Nice.

Sara Patterson [00:04:35] It's actually a phrase that Lavina Fielding Anderson said about September 1993. Lavino was one of the September Six, and that's how she characterized that time. And I, I thought it captured the time and also had some alliteration, which is always nice.

John Dehlin [00:04:58] Yeah, absolutely. I'm also very happy to. To have back on Mormon Stories podcast, the Rebecca Bibliotheca. As you know, we have Rebecca on Mormon Stories often to review books. She is the leader of the Good Book Club. She is a co host of Mormonish Podcast, and she's one of the main reasons we're all here today. So, Rebecca, welcome back to Mormon Stories podcast.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:05:29] Oh, thank you so much. I'm really, really excited to be here and especially to talk about this book. I was working at BYU in the fall of 1993 when all this happened, and it was absolutely a pivotal time for everyone that was there and everyone church wide.

John Dehlin [00:05:44] Yeah. Yeah. Well, we, we really appreciate all the good work that you do, Rebecca, not just for Mormon Stories, but just for our community. You're always a delight to have on.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:05:56] Thank you so much.

John Dehlin [00:05:58] Okay, well, Rebecca, is there any kind of maybe. Is, is there any shopkeeping news items that are worth mentioning? I know we've got a book coming up. So from a book club angle, from a leader book club leader angle, is there anything you'd like to start with?

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:06:17] Yeah, that's good. Let me put on my book club leader hat here or my glasses, maybe, as it may be. So of course, today we're talking about the September 6, and the book did just come out. So a lot of people in the book club just barely got a chance to get it. They may not have been able to finish it. So for our members that are listening today, this is going to be great. It's going to be like sort of a preview of what you're going to be able to continue to read. So we're very excited about that. Our next book coming up is going to be Vengeance Is Mine by the amazing Barbara Brown. I think she's there in studio listening right now. So, Barbara, we're very excited to talk to you and that date will be we'll figure that out soon. But I know everybody's been reading throughout the summer and really enjoying that book.

John Dehlin [00:06:58] So if, if, yeah, if you're ready to start, if you're ready to start reading the next book, the book to read is, yeah, is Barbara Brown and Rick Turley's amazing book on it's kind of a sequel on the Mountain Meadows Massacre. But I'm reading it right now and it's gripping. So check it out, buy it, read it. And we've never really told the full story of the Mountain Meadows Massacre on Mormon stories before. Barbara Brown's never been on Mormon stories before, except when she's been on the panel with Sandra Tanner. Is that the only time, I mean, as a featured solo guest? So we're going to hear Barbara Brown's story as it relates to the Mountain Nose Massacre and talk about her book. So buy it, read it, share it. And enough of that. So, all right, so let's get into it. I guess maybe let's begin by listing who the September 6th were in terms of the core group. Just maybe it's good to name the people that we're talking about before we talk about it.

Who Were the September Six?

Sara Patterson [00:08:10] Sure. It began with Lynn Whitesides, Maxine Hanks, Paul Toscano, Avraham Gileadi, Lavina Fielding Anderson and D. Michael Quinn are the six.

John Dehlin [00:08:26] Okay. Those are the six. All right. So, you know, one of the things that Barbara was most excited about with this book and that I think was really amazing. Well, I guess to begin with, you weren't raised Mormon. You're not a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. And in some ways that's a feature, not a bug, because you can bring an analysis that's balanced maybe without some emotional skin in the game that others might have. And so maybe let's just back up by talking about what it was like to be to be offered the opportunity to write this book and what it was like for you to start, you know, researching it and learning about it from someone who didn't grow up in the faith.

Sara Patterson [00:09:19] I had known about the September 6th for a long time, but I was most knowledgeable, I think, about D. Michael Quinn because I met him during graduate school. He was a friend of one of my professors, so he came to visit campus a number of times. And I got to meet with him and found him to be just such a warm, welcoming scholar who was always very encouraging and always willing to help. And I was excited in 2021 when the university of Utah hosted a conference celebrating Quinn's life. And I participated in that conference and was really. I really enjoyed doing more research about Quinn and finding out more about his experiences both before and after September 1993. I think Quinn. One of the unfortunate things is that we tend to make September 1993 the pivotal moment in his life when we narrate his life. And part of what I was arguing in my paper at the conference was that we need to think more broadly about Quinn's life and not just through. Look at him through the lens of church leaders. And that paper that I gave is now a part of a book that Signature put out called DNA Mormon. And it's got a lot of fantastic essays about Quinn. And so when Barbara. I had just been doing this research about Quinn when Barbara invited me to write the book. And I was really excited to explore the lives of the other six and that time period in even more detail.

Dr. Patterson's Book on the September Six

John Dehlin [00:11:13] Yeah, but I guess that maybe tell people the time period you were given to write the book. I think that's important.

Sara Patterson [00:11:20] Oh, sure. Well, Barbara was hoping that it would come out for the 30th anniversary, which was just last month. And so it was a very quick timeline, but thankfully, Signature, because of its history, has quite an archive. Archive of documents about the September six as authors and as activists. And so that really helped in allowing me to accomplish the very quick timeline because they had so many documents in one place that I could visit and look through.

John Dehlin [00:12:02] Yeah. Okay. And.

Sara Patterson [00:12:05] But.

John Dehlin [00:12:05] But it's. It's one thing to write a book. It's another thing to, like, do all the research and learning.

Sara Patterson [00:12:13] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:12:15] To. To put you to the place where you could write the book. And so I just. Honestly, I can't imagine how much effort and how much stress and pressure it was for you to write.

Sara Patterson [00:12:26] It was what I was to research and write most of the time.

John Dehlin [00:12:28] Yeah. For a year. Yeah.

Sara Patterson [00:12:30] Yes. Yeah, Absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:12:31] Well, it's A. You know, I lived it in a way, and I Learned I knew 5% of what's in this amazing book. So right now, pause this podcast, go buy this book on Amazon if you don't have it. Please support Mormon scholarship. Please support signature books. Support Sarah Patterson. Buy this book. I promise you, you won't regret it. You will understand Mormonism a lot better if you do. Okay, so let's, let's jump in. And Rebecca, I'm going to invite you to just jump in at any point. Is that all right? And I'll just switch to you as soon as I hear you talking. Okay. Okay.

Origins and Meaning of the Term September Six

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:13:11] I do have a question to start out. Yeah, Please, please kind of follow piggybacking on what you were asking. I think the term September six itself, this is one of the interesting comments that I think you made in your book where you said that it sort of tended to compartmentalize the entire scope of everything that happened. I'd love to hear you talk a little bit more about that. I found that very interesting.

Sara Patterson [00:13:34] I think that initially the phrase September 6th popped up very quickly and people latched onto it because it was a really scary time. A lot of scholars and activists in the church didn't know the extent of what was going to happen. And so I think in some ways, calling this group of people the September six allowed people to try to contain what was happening and try to make some sense around it. And I think what's happened is that we've started to use that term too much. And so it's become kind of a shorthand for something that was a much broader process in the church. That was years of the church, church leaders pushing on its scholars and its activists and trying to pull them into line. Part of what I tried to do in the book is deconstruct those boundaries around September 1993 and suggest that actually they what happened that month was maybe the most intense version of something that was happening in the decades around 1993.

John Dehlin [00:15:10] Yeah. And I think in some sense might still be happening to some degree.

Sara Patterson [00:15:14] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:15:15] So let's jump back. I mean, the first point that comes to my mind in terms of setting some historical context is kind of Harold B. Lee and the formation of correlation. That's where my mind goes first. 1960. Ish. But where would you start? Because maybe that's more important.

Sara Patterson [00:15:32] No, I think that that's a great place to start. I think that in the second part of the 20th century, church leaders had anxiety about how rapidly the church was growing. And I think that anxiety can come alongside excitement about the fact that the church was growing and it was being successful in more and more places around the world. But the anxiety was that the church would change away from what it had been because of all of its new membership. And so I think the correlation process was, in part, an attempt to create a center by which members could be measured. It was an attempt to create a force moving towards the hierarchy that put power in the hands, more power in the hands of the hierarchy, and took a church that had lots of different structures within it and unified them under one system. And what that meant was that there was a gradual loss of a lot of spiritual gifts, I think, in the church, because the church was moving more towards kind of a corporate structure. And it also meant that the loss of power for women in the church because they were placed under the oversight of the male hierarchy.

John Dehlin [00:17:14] Yeah. So, like we think about, like, Mutual or, you know, the Relief Society, prior to Correlation, those were kind of largely independent organizations with their own leadership and, if I'm right, their own budget. Right. So part of what correlation did is it said, no, Relief Society, We're. We're bringing you in, we're controlling you and your budget. Is that right?

Sara Patterson [00:17:39] Yes.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:17:40] And.

Sara Patterson [00:17:40] And I think correlation, another important part of it was an. It was an attempt to create a shared set of experiences of the chur church for the church's membership. And so you could expect, wherever you went to church on a Sunday, to have the same lessons, to have the same messages being framed by the church hierarchy for you. And so it was an attempt to standardize as the church was becoming more diverse and global.

John Dehlin [00:18:17] Yeah. And it was Harold B. Lee that was kind of tasked to start that under David O. McKay's administration. Is that right?

Sara Patterson [00:18:25] Yep.

John Dehlin [00:18:25] Okay, so what does that have to do with, like, curriculum and doctrine and theology and that sort of thing?

Sara Patterson [00:18:34] I think that part of the process was, as I said, trying to make sure that members were getting the same messages from the church hierarchy. And so there was an expectation or an emphasis more on doctrinal beliefs and making sure that believers had the lessons about what Latter Day Saints believed. And so membership could, in part, be defined by what a person believed.

John Dehlin [00:19:05] Right. Okay.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:19:07] Could I interject?

John Dehlin [00:19:08] Yeah, please.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:19:10] Yeah. That's the other thing I've kind of collected that's great. Questions back and forth. And one of our book club members going along with this idea, was questioning how the concept of a doctrinal core, like you're talking about these core beliefs, how did they feel that this would create the Stability that they needed in the changing times. You kind of addressed that a little bit. But. But was there this hope that it would completely stabilize everything just with this one thread of doctrine running through everything?

Sara Patterson [00:19:39] I'm not sure that they believed that it could stabilize everything, but I think it. I think for them, it functioned as a way of trying to pull people towards the hierarchy. And there was a hope that people would kind of place their trust in the hierarchy and therefore trust what the leaders were teaching and saying. And so if the leadership could unify in terms of its message and have that trickle down from the hierarchy down to the local ward community, then that could help counter what they saw as the kind of outward flowing forces in the church.

Pillars of Purity in Mormon Culture

John Dehlin [00:20:27] So in your book, you introduce this idea of purity, which in Mormon culture, you immediately think like sexual purity. But would you mind describing what you meant by the term purity and how it applies to correlation and what came after?

Sara Patterson [00:20:46] When I was reading the various talks that members of the church hierarchy gave during that time, the word that stood out to me the most was purity. And that's when I started to kind of see purity as structuring what the church hierarchy was trying to do. And so the first, I talk about three pillars of purity in the book. And the first was that doctrinal purity. And so it was an attempt on the part of the hierarchy to emphasize that a believer, a member of the church, had a certain set of beliefs and that those lessons were being taught on a regular basis. And so that when people were going to their ward meetings, they were getting the doctrinal core that the hierarchy wanted them to hear. The correlation process was also about not just what people were doing on Sundays, but it was an attempt to get the church to shape every aspect of people's lives. And so the second pillar of purity that I talk about.

John Dehlin [00:21:58] Wait, can I ask you really quickly. Sorry, before we jump to the second.

Sara Patterson [00:22:01] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:22:02] What were some examples of doctrinal impurity that maybe were flagging the brethren and causing them to be concerned? And if there's even two or three, it'd be fun to. Whatever comes to mind is some of the people involved and what the issues were around doctrinal purity.

Doctrinal Boundaries and the Book of Mormon

Sara Patterson [00:22:20] Sure. So the first thing that comes to mind is the historicity of the Book of Mormon. So one of the things that some scholars were getting disciplined for was the argument that the Book of Mormon was not exactly what it claimed to be, that it was a product of the 19th century United States, and those scholars were trying to create a faithful way of understanding the Book of Mormon differently of seeing it not as a historical document, but still seeing it as holding spiritual truths. And for the church leadership, that was a step too far.

John Dehlin [00:23:13] And some of the characters involved in

Sara Patterson [00:23:14] that conversation were, sure, David Wright and Brent Metcalfe.

John Dehlin [00:23:19] Okay, so David was a BYU professor.

Sara Patterson [00:23:22] He was.

John Dehlin [00:23:23] Who was kind of David Bachavoy's mentor, as I understand it. Did he end up at Brandeis?

Sara Patterson [00:23:29] Yes, he spent the rest of his career at Brandeis.

John Dehlin [00:23:33] And he just learned about biblical criticism, historical criticism, applied those techniques to the Book of Mormon and said, hey, that's right.

Sara Patterson [00:23:40] He actually, his story is really interesting, and it's one that I tell in the book, because he spent quite a bit of time trying not to take in the messages that he was receiving in his scriptural studies. He wanted to be the next Hugh Nibley when he was growing up, who's one of the apologists at byu. And so I think he saw the Nibley path, and that was his path forward. And he eventually had so many questions about the claims that the Book of Mormon was making that he tried to reframe his understanding of it as scripture so that he could still provide a place for people in the church who didn't believe that the Book of Mormon was a historical document.

John Dehlin [00:24:31] And he. I think he was gone from BYU by the time I got there. Was his disciplinary. He had some discipline, Church discipline, right.

Sara Patterson [00:24:40] Yes, it was after he left BYU.

John Dehlin [00:24:42] And was it after 93?

Sara Patterson [00:24:45] Yes, it was in 1994. April 1994.

John Dehlin [00:24:49] So it was right after. Okay.

Sara Patterson [00:24:50] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:24:50] Okay. So. And then we've had Brent Metcalf on, and his discipline comes later as well. But he. And we're actually planning to have him on Mormon stories relatively soon because there's an anniversary of that book that he

Sara Patterson [00:25:06] came out with called Approaches to the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:25:10] Yeah.

Sara Patterson [00:25:10] Is that the right. Am I capturing the title correctly? New Approaches to the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:25:14] New Approaches to the Book of Mormon. Yeah. So we'll be talking about Brett in just a second. Okay, so. And that's really interesting because today, all these progressive Mormon scholars, like, you know, I don't need to name them, but there's a lot of progressive Mormon scholars that are trying to help us salvage the Book of Mormon, that it can still be scripture without being historical. So, I mean, so he was just a pioneer a little bit. You know, Brent and David were just a little bit ahead of their time.

Sara Patterson [00:25:40] Yes, they were.

John Dehlin [00:25:40] Okay. In terms of. In terms of doctrinal purity. Any other names come to mind?

Sara Patterson [00:25:46] Well, I would say that on a number of fronts, church leaders felt as though the position of prophet was being called into question in new ways. Some of that was in historical work. So historians like D. Michael Quinn were writing about prophets historically in ways that church leaders found problematic, because he was writing about them as humans who made errors. And he believed that you could talk about a prophet as having human error and also as having revelation and spiritual wisdom and spiritual inspiration. And so there was concern on the part of church leaders about talking about prophets in the past in ways that they felt damaged their reputations. And I would say the same was true. They were concerned about how people were talking about the prophets in the late 20th century. And so they wanted to kind of maintain the aura and holiness around the position of prophet. And they didn't want people asking questions about whether or not the prophet was right in various decisions that he was making.

John Dehlin [00:27:10] When I think about that question, I think about Leonard Arrington and sort of those Camelot years of church history from 72 to 82. It wasn't so much that he or others around him were questioning the role of prophet. As I understand it. They were just sharing factual historical documents about what prophet said and did. And that naturally led members to say, whoa, why was Brigham Young? Why was there alcohol? Why was there tobacco? Like, what about these mistakes? Who, let's just say between the 70s and 90s, who was questioning the role of the prophet and. Or trying to redefine it? Well, or was there other people we can peg to that?

Sara Patterson [00:27:55] I think that you raise a good point. The issue was how the church hierarchy was experiencing what people were doing. And so the fact that historians were writing about prophets as humans who made errors, rather than writing hagiographies that talked about them as kind of saints walking above the ground, that was experienced as a challenge to the role of the prophet. Got it.

John Dehlin [00:28:28] Yeah. Okay. Okay. Did Avram Gileadi fall in this category of doctrinal purity at all?

Avraham Gileadi's Unusual Case

Sara Patterson [00:28:37] Yes. So Avraham Gileadi is kind of an interesting case because I call him the least 6ish of the September six. I love that because he doesn't fit a lot of the patterns that were. Were present in the other members of the September six. And I think that part of what happened is that he was lumped in, in part because his excommunication happened in the same month. But he was really different because he was a more conservative, theologically. Conservative, Theologically conservative, socially, I think, member of the church. And he was writing about the last days. So he did Scriptural studies. And he was talking about what would happen in the last days. He was using the Book of Isaiah and the Book of Mormon as his template for talking about end times. Right, End times. And what he was doing was he was seeing in the 1990s evidence that the world was in the end times. And so his work was picked up by a lot of ultra conservative members of the church who were doing things like homeschooling their children, food storage, wondering if maybe polygamy was the right path of the church. And so his work was appealing to ultra conservative members. And one of the arguments that I make in the book is that his inclusion in the September 6th allowed people to embrace what I call a middle of the road narrative, which framed the church leaders as kind of a neutral body in the center, and then put on the extremes both the ultra conservatives and more progressive scholarly folks in the church. And I think that that's a problematic narrative for a number of reasons. I don't think it's an accurate portrayal of what was happening historically, mainly. And part of what I think it hides from us is that the church hierarchy was very active in its attempts to align itself with the religious right. And so it was a lot of the General Conference talks from the time could have been given from evangelical pulpits across United States. So there was a lot of work on the part of the church hierarchy to make that set of political and theological connections. And I think this middle of the road narrative makes it difficult for us to see that.

John Dehlin [00:31:50] I was surprised to learn from your book that Hugh Nibley was a fan, apparently, of Avram Gileadi.

Sara Patterson [00:31:56] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:31:56] And that FARMS was also an early supporter and that he was even being evaluated for maybe an excerpt of one of his books to be in the Ensign.

Sara Patterson [00:32:08] Yes, absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:32:09] So, I mean, he was becoming mainstream, and he had some mainstream support.

Sara Patterson [00:32:15] He did have some mainstream support. And then he and Malcolm Jepsen crossed paths and things did not go well for Gileadi.

John Dehlin [00:32:27] Okay, we'll get back to that. But I just want to call our viewers and listeners attention to, you know, if today you think prepper Mormon prepper, if you think Julie Rowe, if you think Denver Snuffer and his movement to encourage members to have their own relationship with Jesus, to have their own spiritual awakenings, questions about whether the current Mormon church is an apostasy or needs to go back to its roots, and even Chad Dabo, Lori Valla's stuff, I think it would not be hard to draw sort of their lineage back to the influence of Avram Gileadi and others like him. And in my view, he's sort of the grandfather of some of that modern neo fundamentalism that I, you know.

Sara Patterson [00:33:16] Yeah. And I think that he and the others who were drawn to him were interested in talking about the purity of the church. So I think that they accepted the fact that purity, the idea that purity was the main thing that the church should be thinking about. What they disagreed with the church hierarchy about was what that purity looked like. And so I think that's very different from the other members of the six, who I argue, and I'm sure we'll get to this later, but who I argue were kind of imagining a different system for the church theologically.

John Dehlin [00:33:52] Okay. Did you mention the debates between Eugene England and. And I believe. Was it Boyd K. Packer as. As an issue of. Of. Or maybe Bruce R. McConkie as a matter of conflict?

Sara Patterson [00:34:08] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:34:09] Okay.

Sara Patterson [00:34:09] Yes, absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:34:10] Is it worth just mentioning that really briefly?

Sara Patterson [00:34:12] I think England was somebody who experienced this movement towards purity in the church as a problem for him because he believed that his faith was broad enough to ask questions and to engage in dialogue. And so he wanted people in the church to be having conversations about theology and thinking kind of creatively about what faith might look like. And I think because of that, he kept running up against church authorities who didn't want him to be asking the questions he was asking, didn't want him to be engaging in the theological play that he was engaging in.

John Dehlin [00:34:58] And some of the main topics of conflict that he faced were.

Sara Patterson [00:35:03] Well, there are two that I focus on in the book. One was his disagreement with McConkie about the idea that God could be perfect and also progr. And so England was kind of taken with that idea of changing over time as being a part of God's perfection. And McConkie wrote him, eventually wrote him a letter that's a really powerful statement about how church authorities might wield their power over church membership. But there was also a moment when he was in the audience listening to a talk given by Lavina Fielding Anderson where she was talking about what church leaders had been doing in recent years. I think the Talk was in 1992. She was talking about what church leaders had been doing and the kinds of discipline that were happening in the church. And she talked about the Strengthening Church Members Committee that was monitoring the public discourse of various scholars and activists. The members of the committee would highlight passages in those talks that they found problematic and then send that information to stake presidents and bishops. And it was all framed with the idea that the hierarchy was helping local stake presidents and bishops who might not know about what members of their wards were doing or who might not, because of their backgrounds, be able to perceive the dangers of what people were doing. And England got up when Lavina was talking about the Strengthening Church Members Committee, and he kind of said no, and he accused the committee of kind of harming the church. And that was filmed. And so he ended up.

John Dehlin [00:37:20] Made the news, right?

Sara Patterson [00:37:21] Yes. He ended up issuing an apology and saying that he hadn't kind of followed the process that the church sets forth about kind of knowing. Talking to people immediately above you and not making public arguments against what the church hierarchy was doing. And so, yeah, I think he came up against that expectation of purity quite often because he imagined the faith differently.

John Dehlin [00:37:54] I think you note that he didn't apologize for what he said.

Sara Patterson [00:37:57] Right, right, right.

John Dehlin [00:37:59] Yeah, he apologized for how he said it.

Sara Patterson [00:38:01] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:38:02] For those who don't know, Eugene England was a beloved professor of English at byu. He was there when I was there. He would take kids on study abroad to England, but published in Sunstone, he was the original founder of Dialogue Journal of Mormon Thought. Just an amazing human so. And then for those who don't know, this is unimaginable. Bruce Al McConkie and Boyd and Kate Packer were senior apostles in the. In the 80s. Very revered apostles. Okay, okay. So that. That kind of maybe gives us a sense for doctrinal purity. Is that right?

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:38:40] Can I ask one question, please, Rebecca, please. About the topic of doctrinal purpose, please.

John Dehlin [00:38:44] Yeah, jump in here, Jump in here.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:38:46] This conversation is so great. I don't even want to jump. Veer away. But I also have to say, oh, the Eugene England era. I almost feel like you use the word Camelot, John. I feel like that was. I was there at the tail end of that and just, you know, 7th East Press and Grandpa's books and all of that going on. And. And of course, the events we're talking about, the September 6th, it really just capped that, you know, that was over. But one of our book club members, as we're talking about the sense of create the church, trying to create its own intellectual culture and sort of standing in a different place from the mainstream. And a lot of that was supposed to, it seemed like kind of stem from the BYU scholars like we're talking about. And there was something that you mentioned about an emphasis on revelation over reason. We have some questions about that. If you want to just maybe talk about that for a second. I thought that was really interesting.

Sara Patterson [00:39:36] Sure. The Talk that immediately came to mind was one that Dallin Oaks gave, I think, in 1989, about the historicity of the Book of Mormon. And one of the things that he said when he set out was that he was going to talk using a kind of scholarly framework. But he very quickly said, faithful people use the Spirit as the source of their knowledge. And that's the authority that ultimately tells me that the Book of Mormon is a historical document. And so from the very outset, he was setting up a different set of sources of knowledge than someone like David Wright was. And so where David Wright was trying to frame the question as, does the scripture line up with what we know to be historically true? Oaks was saying, I'm going to start with the premise, because the Spirit has told me that the scripture is what it claims to be. And so I think the juxtaposition of David Wright's argument with Dallin Oaks is a really great example of how church leaders were using different sources of knowledge to frame their ideas about various aspects of church history.

John Dehlin [00:41:06] Thank you. Thanks, Rebecca. Okay, so that's doctrinal purity. Yes, at least some examples of doctrinal purity. The next is bodily purity.

Sara Patterson [00:41:22] Familial.

John Dehlin [00:41:23] Familial. Familial purity. Okay, what do we mean by that?

Sara Patterson [00:41:27] So one of the things that I talk about and I mentioned earlier is that the church leadership, with correlation, wanted the church to affect every aspect of people's lives. And so part of that was framing what the family and the home were supposed to look like. And that's what I call familial purity. And so church leaders spend a lot of time talking about how the ideal family structure was a heterosexual marriage that happened in the temple, where the two genders were complementary to one another. And so women and men had different domains that they oversaw in terms of the family. So men were supposed to provide and protect and also bring the priesthood, be the priesthood representative for their family. And then women were expected to nurture the children and take care of the home. And so familial purity is about defining what. How people should do their gender and also how they should parent their children.

John Dehlin [00:42:40] Yeah, And I'm. I'm just realizing now, prior to the Equal Rights Amendment and kind of. I don't know, would that be third wave feminism?

Sara Patterson [00:42:50] Oh, I don't do waves.

John Dehlin [00:42:51] Okay, yeah, I get it. Yeah. So let's say prior to the. The seventies and the era, and then prior. Way prior to kind of LGBTQ advocacy. I wonder if in the 40s and 50s, the brethren even had to really focus on familial purity or if that was just the water everyone was swimming in and just the assumptions. Did we get an increase in teachings and concern around familial purity, mainly starting with the era?

Sara Patterson [00:43:23] Yes. Now, I will say that I think after the church gave up polygamy, there was an attempt to frame masculinity in the same way as other Americans and their churches were framing masculinity. And so I think that the church was talking about gender throughout the 20th century. But I think that you are absolutely right that when the ERA happened, there was definitely a push to emphasize gender expectations and also be very clear about what the expectations for women.

John Dehlin [00:44:04] Yeah, yeah. And then as. As Mormon feminism with. With Exponent 2 and other things starts to really rise in the 70s and 80s and women more and more in the United States, divorce laws change, and then women in the workplace started becoming more and more prevalent. I'm guessing just the Brethren getting more and more nervous. Is that right?

Sara Patterson [00:44:29] Absolutely, yeah. Whenever you have an understanding of gender that's complementary, and if you imagine it as kind of two halves of one whole, then anytime that you feel that one of the genders is expanding in terms of its roles, that necessarily means that the other one's contracting.

John Dehlin [00:44:50] And so it's a zero sum game. It's a zero sum game, gender roles.

Sara Patterson [00:44:54] And so I think church leaders were definitely feeling like, well, if women start doing things that they weren't doing before, then that's going to mean that men are losing something in the process. And that's definitely how they talked about it during that time.

Mormon Feminism and Women's Voices

John Dehlin [00:45:11] And so we'll talk about, let's just say pre September 1993. Who were some of the big voices in this arena in or out of the September six that were causing the Brethren concern? I'm thinking Carolyn Pearson. She was kind of an early feminist. Somehow she escaped all this. But I'm thinking of women's exponent too. Like who were those. Who was. Who was bugging the Brethren around family purity?

Sara Patterson [00:45:38] Well, I think Sonia.

John Dehlin [00:45:40] Yeah, Sonia. Tell us who Sonia Johnson was.

Sara Patterson [00:45:43] Yeah, was the one who was bugging them kind of the most and the most publicly. She was a church member who heard about the church's stance on the era, which was that the church hierarchy was against the era. The hierarchy framed the Equal Rights Amendment as a moral issue. While they said that they wouldn't make public statements about political issues, they did what other churches in the religious right were doing, which was frame the Equal Rights Amendment as a moral issue, which then put it squarely under their purview to make what were very political claims against the era. The church was very active against the era. And Sonia Johnson, I'm not going to say this quote exactly right, but she said that it was three of the most beautiful words in the English language or something like that, Equal Rights Amendment. And so she really just had an entirely different understanding. And she was one of the people who founded Mormons for the Equal Rights Amendment. And she was very political in her activism in the state of Virginia, which was one of the states where the ERA was being hotly debated. And so I think she was definitely a threat because she was trying to support a law that the church hierarchy believed would collapse the gender system. And so I think she was on their radar maybe more than anybody else because of that.

John Dehlin [00:47:40] And remind me, I mean, Martha Bradley's book on the era, Podiums and Pedestals. Pedestals and podiums and Podiums. I've had a dream to have Martha on to tell that story.

Sara Patterson [00:47:55] You should.

John Dehlin [00:47:56] Yeah. Well, if she'll come, I'll just say right now, I'd love to have her. But telling the story of the Mormon Church playing a major role in defeating the ERA nationwide is a really important story. Remind me, I believe Sonia Johnson was excommunicated. Is that correct?

Sara Patterson [00:48:12] She was.

John Dehlin [00:48:12] And what year? Around what year was that?

Sara Patterson [00:48:14] 79.

John Dehlin [00:48:14] 79, yeah. Okay. So that was a full 14 years before 1993. Okay. And then. Oh, go ahead.

Sara Patterson [00:48:21] Well, I would just say that her excommunication, though, cast a very big shadow over Mormon feminism and sent the message to women who thought that feminism could be a part of their faith, that the church hierarchy was kind of watching and that they needed to be careful about what they were saying. And so I think that, you see, after Sonia Johnson, there were absolutely feminists in the church, but they were speaking very carefully about what it is they wanted to accomplish. And often it was, we want to be mothers, we want to help oversee the home, but we also want these other things. So it was very kind of careful work to try to expand women's roles without threatening the understanding of the gender binary.

John Dehlin [00:49:24] And so if Sonia Johnson and the ERA and her excommunications sent a chill through emerging Mormon feminism, who were the main rabble rousers, Feminist rabble rousers. And. Or what were the main organizations from the early 80s to the early 90s that were. That were braving the Brethren's disapproval?

Sara Patterson [00:49:49] Well, I think one of the groups that's remembered Most in the 80s was the Boston Collective A group that started because they wanted again, I would just characterize it as more. They were satisfied with their lives, they were satisfied with being wives and mothers, but they wanted more than just that. And so they were really important in terms of getting publications going that talked about women's issues. And so I think that would be an example that I would.

John Dehlin [00:50:28] Now, is Claudia Bushman part of that? Yes, Claudia Bushman and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. And when was Exponent 2 formed? I don't mean to ask you that

Sara Patterson [00:50:37] cold, but Barbara, do you remember.

John Dehlin [00:50:40] You can say it the year.

Sara Patterson [00:50:41] You can say it.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:50:41] 74.

Sara Patterson [00:50:42] 74.

John Dehlin [00:50:42] 74. Okay, so that emerged pre Equal Rights Amendment. Did it continue after the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, or did it kind of. It kind of went away at some point? No, it never went away. Okay. Barbara's. Barbara's being our. Some podcasts have like a fact checker, and Barbara is playing the un. Unpaid role of fact checker for today's Mormons. She's over there nodding yes and no and texting me the right title of a book. It's great. Okay. All right, so, but were there other. I don't think. I can't think of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich or Claudia Bushman as being rabble rousers. So what was what in the 80s and early 90s was actually alarming the brethren around familial purity?

Sara Patterson [00:51:29] Feminism.

John Dehlin [00:51:29] Yeah. Mormon feminism was.

Sara Patterson [00:51:31] Well, no.

John Dehlin [00:51:31] No feminism. Oh, just nationwide.

Sara Patterson [00:51:33] It was alarming though.

John Dehlin [00:51:34] Okay.

Sara Patterson [00:51:34] Okay. Yes. And so I think these women were very gently pushing on expectations and boundaries, but feminism within the larger culture was very alarming to them. And so they talked about feminism as an external, foreign movement that was not part of the church.

John Dehlin [00:51:57] Like Gloria Steinem.

Sara Patterson [00:51:59] Yeah. They framed it as feminism is trying to come into the church and upset what is a happy and stable community.

John Dehlin [00:52:08] So more of an external threat.

Sara Patterson [00:52:10] Right.

John Dehlin [00:52:10] Than an internal threat.

Sara Patterson [00:52:12] Right.

John Dehlin [00:52:12] Okay. In terms of familial purity, were there other main pillars other than feminism? And I have to ask, were there lgbtq? I mean, ultimately, we're gonna talk about Packer naming the three great threats of the church. How much noise, I'll say noise respectfully, was being made about LGBTQ issues and gay rights in the 80s and early 90s, or was that not much of a thing yet? What made him worried about it?

The Church's Three Perceived Threats

Sara Patterson [00:52:41] Oh, it was a thing.

John Dehlin [00:52:42] Yeah.

Sara Patterson [00:52:43] And it was on church leaders minds. So the third pillar that I talk about is bodily purity.

John Dehlin [00:52:49] Okay. So familial. That's not the LGT stuff as a family.

Sara Patterson [00:52:52] It is so part of how the Religious right was framing feminism was that it was going to upset how the family was structured. And so they made the argument that the nation was founded on the family and that within the family, the family had to. Women had to have specific roles and men had to have specific roles. So what they were arguing was that when those rules were upset, the entire foundation of the nation was going to start to crumble. And they linked a bunch of things together in their minds. So when women started to step out of their place, then that would cause more divorce, it would make the culture more welcoming of abortion. Once women kind of expanded their roles, men would start to lose their sense of their own masculinity. And so one of the arguments that they made was that women expanding their roles would lead men to homosexuality. So they had a very.

John Dehlin [00:54:09] That's how it works, huh?

Sara Patterson [00:54:11] Yeah. They linked up all of these, what they saw as evils in the culture, kind of from women upsetting their roles, all of these other things would happen. And eventually they argued the nation would fall apart. So the familial and the bodily are definitely related to one another.

John Dehlin [00:54:29] Got it. What are you laughing about, Rebecca?

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:54:32] Oh, I'm just laughing about the whole concept of the three pillars. Because people my age that I've been talking to, it's definitely helped us deconstruct what the heck happened to us. Seriously. Born at that age where you start primary in the late 60s, you go through, you're in college in the 80s, we can clearly see how these pillars start to creep in and are in play in every single thing that we do, every decision we make. I clearly remember a woman in the 70s standing up during testimony meeting and talking about era, and she was forcibly removed from the pulpit in my ward. So, you know, to read about these things, but then to realize in hindsight, this is what happened. This shaped who I am. This shaped my decision to get my degree at byu, but then to leave my job when my children were little to go home. I mean, you can just track it all the way along. And others in the book club that I've talked to have having these same feelings that, oh, that's what happened to us. Huh? For good or for bad. But I guess one of the questions they had is perhaps, how do you see. How do you see familial purity today? I mean, I know there are strides being made. I think it's behind what everyone else in the world is. How do you sense that in the church? And where do you think that will be headed?

John Dehlin [00:55:47] You're jumping outside the Chronology, Rebecca. Oh, that's great.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:55:52] Even with familial.

John Dehlin [00:55:53] No, it's great. No, no, no, it's great.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:55:54] I'm kidding.

John Dehlin [00:55:55] I'm totally joking. Yes, please, please.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [00:55:57] We can take that to the end.

John Dehlin [00:55:58] No, no, no. It's good.

Sara Patterson [00:56:01] I think that there is evidence that the church is becoming more welcoming of women, expanding their roles. I would say a couple of buts to that. One would be it's an expansion without de emphasizing motherhood and the role of wife. And so it's adding some to, but while still claiming that those roles are central to a woman's identity and also her salvation. That was my first one, and now I'm trying to remember what my second one was.

John Dehlin [00:56:47] Major, major changes.

Sara Patterson [00:56:49] So I think that that's a major change. I think that there are changes happening in the temple rituals. There's more discourse about heavenly parents. I think all of those indicate that there's movement in terms of understanding femininity within the church. But I also think that that comes with boundaries being set even more strictly about arguments, say, for women in the priesthood. I think there are certain lines that. That the church hierarchy has indicated will not be crossed.

John Dehlin [00:57:31] Got it. Excellent. Okay. So familial purity is mostly about feminism and the role of women versus men.

Sara Patterson [00:57:41] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:57:42] Okay. And so lgbt. So what falls into bodily purity, your third pillar?

Sara Patterson [00:57:50] Over the course of the 20th century, the church just further and further emphasized things like the word of wisdom. So, in part, bodily purity is about what you're taking into your body, but it was also about sexual practices. And the religious rite during this same time was very concerned about sexual purity. And so, in many ways, the church was just participating in that discourse of the religious rite. And part of that was about policing, in particular, women's purity. But you see in the church hierarchy talks and writings about this issue, that there's a concern about men in particular, having sex with other men as an issue of contamination of the priesthood, and I think, therefore, the institution as a whole. And so sexual practices were very much a part of that understanding of bodily purity.

LGBTQ Voices and Bodily Purity

John Dehlin [00:58:55] And were there voices in the 70s and 80s and early 90s in Mormonism that were advocating for gay rights or LGBTQ equality within the hierarchy? No, in the membership, like dissenting voices.

Sara Patterson [00:59:13] So the first thing that came to my mind was the group affirmation that started with a group of men on BYU's campus, kind of creating community together and wanting to create a space where they could be members of the church and also embrace their sexual identities. Affirmation stands out to Me, because it was a really important organization, I think, throughout the late 70s, but then definitely in the 80s and 90s, for a lot of people, including, I think, D. Michael Quinn, after he was excommunicated, it was a place where people could form community and share their faith tradition with each other, even if they had been excommunicated. One of the things I talk about in the book is that Affirmation had a series of documents that talked about what excommunication would look like for people. And part of what they were trying to do was make it something that was as known as it possibly could be so that it wasn't scary, simply because I don't know what's happening to me. And so I think it was really important because it was a supportive community that was saying to people over and over again throughout Affirmation newsletters, you see them saying, the spirit does not leave you. Even if you're excommunicated, the spirit does not leave you. And they were pushing back against a theology that they had been taught that if you were excommunicated, the spirit, in fact did leave you. And so I think they were creating community, they were creating theology that supported people who were part of the LGBTQ community.

John Dehlin [01:01:13] And now, as we. As we're talking about, I've never made this connection, but just like we're talking about the era in the 70s, Harvey Milk and kind of the gay rights movement really started taking hold in the late 70s, early 80s. Legislation around, you know, let's just say gay affirming legislation was starting to be considered. Harvey Milk's assassinated, what, 78 or something like that. And then Oakes joins the. The Mormon church hierarchy as an apostle in, like, 84, if I'm right. And doesn't he pen a memo? Like, one of his first acts is to, like, pen a strategy memo on, like, the great homosexual threat in state and federal legislatures kind of thing.

Sara Patterson [01:01:57] Yes. And one of the things that that memo said was that the church should create an official document that defined marriage and family in a very specific way. And what he was saying was

John Dehlin [01:02:14] that

Sara Patterson [01:02:14] could become the legal grounds for the church actively working against the legalization of same sex marriage. And so he was setting up what the family proclamation is and how it functioned. And once again, the church was framing same sex sexuality as a moral issue rather than a political issue, so that it could act politically against what it saw as a threat to the family and the structure of the church.

John Dehlin [01:02:54] Yeah. Okay. Okay. And is there any other major pillar to bodily purity before I.

Sara Patterson [01:03:04] No, I think that captures. Okay, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:03:06] Okay. Gerardo asked me to ask a really important question. Did you do any research? And in the book, do you talk at all about excommunication as a tool for either membership removal, obviously, but also as a way to influence the zeitgeist, the Mormon Zeitgeist. Were there a lot of excommunications for apostasy in the 60s and 70s and 80s? How did any of these clustered excommunications happen before September 93? Any big names come to mind other than Sonia Johnson? Mainly for apostasy?

Earlier Disciplinary Actions and the Road to 1993

Sara Patterson [01:03:44] Yeah, there were certainly disciplinary hearings. I'm thinking of what some have called a mini purge in the 80s where a number of scholars were called in by their bishops to talk about the scholarship that they were producing. So I think the church, kind of more broadly was using discipline as a way to pull people back in line. But one of the things that it learned with Sonia Johnson and maybe again with the September six, was that excommunication brings a lot of publicity, both positive and negative. And what's coming to mind is a passage in Leonard Arrington's diary where he talked about Sonia Johnson and all of the publicity around what was happening to her. And he said, the church can't win. He basically said, the church can't win this one. And so I think that excommunication was a really powerful tool to send a message to believers that there are certain lines that you can't cross. But it also, in the late 20th century, was getting more and more attention outside of the church, which was causing some backlash against the church.

John Dehlin [01:05:06] As I'm trying to think about some of the most prominent sort of excommunications for scholarship or intellectual stuff, there's obviously Fawn brodie in the mid-1940s. I know that Juanita Brooks was at least, you know, fearing for her membership for writing on the Mountain Meadows Massacre. I think somebody basically said, back off on that one. I think Sterling McMurran in the 1960s may have been on the hot seat a little bit.

Sara Patterson [01:05:36] And Lester Bush was on the hot seat, too.

John Dehlin [01:05:38] Lester Bush, for the dialogue article. I. I'm hearing from my Fact Checker producer, Barbara, that Arrington feared excommunication. And I know Sandra Tanner would have either. I think she either resigned or would have been excommunicated in the early 60s. But like a clustered purge to not only stop people, but also to send major shockwaves through an entire community, are you aware of that ever happening? Okay, not.

Sara Patterson [01:06:15] Not in that way, not in the 20th century. No.

John Dehlin [01:06:18] Okay, okay. All right. I know there are excommunications when some of the apostles wouldn't bend on polygamy and that sort of thing. Okay, so. All right. So I think it's important, tell me if I'm wrong, to just talk about the role of dialogue in Sunstone, and specifically not just. Well, yeah, dialogue and Sunstone, the journal magazine, but also the Sunstone Symposium, and how throughout the 80s to the early 90s, that starts building concern amongst the brethren as platforms for bodily and doctrinal and familial impurity from the standpoint of the brethren. Right, yeah.

Sara Patterson [01:07:01] Well, in 1991, the hierarchy, he issued a statement about the dangers of symposia, and it was definitely focused on groups like Sunstone

John Dehlin [01:07:15] without naming Sunstone without naming Sunstone.

Sara Patterson [01:07:17] Right. I think everybody knew what the church hierarchy was talking about in a lot of its talks without ever naming the exact individual or group that they were concerned with. When I was interviewing Lynn Whitesides, one of the things that she talked about was how important those meetings were for people who were struggling with questions of faith. And she talked about how they always had panels that talked about feminism, that talked about all of the issues of the day tied to justice questions. But also they were a place where people could come together and feel safe saying, I have this question or I have this concern, and no one would point at them and say, well, then you're not a true believer. And so part of what she said, and this is a hindsight thing, but she said, I think if the church had just left those groups alone, then a lot of the people would have worked through their issues because they would have had community and space where they could ask the questions that they had and not feel like their religious and spiritual identity was at stake to just even speak a question. And so that's always stood out to me because I think that dialogue, but Sunstone in particular, were places that offered people the space to have conversations.

John Dehlin [01:09:04] Yeah, yeah. And the brother didn't like that. Were there any particularly noteworthy events that you would call like the match or the spark that led to, let's just say, Packer and Jepsen just kind of zoning in. In 1993, were there any big things that came to mind that made 1993 kind of the year?

Sara Patterson [01:09:29] I guess I see it more as a very long build up. And so I think that in the late 80s and early 90s, BYU had a new feminist student organization.

John Dehlin [01:09:48] What were they called?

Sara Patterson [01:09:49] Voice.

John Dehlin [01:09:50] Voice, yeah. Joyner Brooks was a part of that.

Sara Patterson [01:09:52] Yeah. And at BYU people were talking about the issue of academic freedom. And I think it was just a kind of building pressure that external. What they perceived as external forces were kind of squeezing and pushing in. And so to my mind, it was kind of a longer build.

John Dehlin [01:10:14] Okay. Than any big.

Sara Patterson [01:10:15] Then I wouldn't pick just one spark.

John Dehlin [01:10:18] Okay. Okay. And then there's that famous talk that Boyd K. Packer gave. Do you want to talk about that?

Sara Patterson [01:10:23] Sure. It was a talk that he gave in May 1993 to the All Church Coordinating Council, which was a group that was part of the correlation process. And in it he identified three enemies of the church, what he called so called scholars and feminists, and the gay lesbian. What he called the gay lesbian movement.

John Dehlin [01:10:52] So I always think of as gays, feminists and intellectuals. Right. The three great threats to the Mormon Church.

Sara Patterson [01:10:58] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:10:58] And so. Oh, go ahead.

Sara Patterson [01:10:59] Well, and I would just say that part of what he was saying was he was trying to explain the need for correlation. And he was saying to this group that was part of the correlation process, that as the church is growing, people are giving public talks here and public talks there, and they're publishing this and they're publishing that, and the people understand that as I published this paper, I gave this talk. But he thought the correlation process was about seeing how all of those things fit together into a larger puzzle. And he was basically saying to this group, we're the ones who can see the puzzle. So we can see how any one piece is a problem in a way that other people can't.

John Dehlin [01:11:51] Yeah, but was it also like a warning kind of?

Sara Patterson [01:11:54] Oh, absolutely.

John Dehlin [01:11:55] Kind of like, stay in your lane. Also, once the church denounced, symposium did not make it. I mean, prior to the early 90s, you attend a Sunstone symposium. I hear that it had an attendance number of up to like 10,000. I think we interviewed Elder Albert Peck early on in the Life of Mormon stories. I believe that 10,000 number, we're talking BYU professors, CES, church education system, church employees all milling around, super faithful people engaging in Sunstone. Once that. Once the denunciation of symposia happened, what did that do to attendance at Sunstone and publishing in both Dialogue and Sunstone?

Sara Patterson [01:12:39] Yeah. Well, it was an interesting mix of things because I think the next Sunstone conference had a much higher number than the year before. Really?

John Dehlin [01:12:49] Oh, Streisand effect.

Sara Patterson [01:12:51] Exactly. But the number of BYU faculty at the conference dropped dramatically.

John Dehlin [01:12:58] Got it.

Sara Patterson [01:12:59] So at least the faculty at BYU understood that their attendance would be seen as a kind of betrayal.

John Dehlin [01:13:08] Rebecca, did you have a question or thought around that question.

BYU as a Microcosm of Church Tensions

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:13:12] I did have a question again. We were discussing this, of course, in the book club, and somebody wondered if you felt that BYU was kind of a microcosm for the entire church at large. I think that would be interesting to hear your thoughts on that.

John Dehlin [01:13:22] Yeah, Great question.

Sara Patterson [01:13:24] It is a great question. And I do think in a lot of ways it is. It was and it is. I think that for the church, BYU is kind of the example of. It is imagined as the example of what the place would be where people were living Zion. And so I think that that means that when concerns come up about feminist groups on campus or particular speakers, that the stakes feel really high because it's imagined as an example of what the world could be eventually. And I also think that BYU is a really important site during this time because the church was aligning itself with the religious right. And there was a much broader set of questions being asked about what was happening in higher education, similar to questions that we see today. Are students being taught patriotism? Are they being taught how to be spiritual leaders? Is diversity going to lead people astray? All of those questions. I think the religious right was imagining higher education as kind of a dangerous place where those questions were being asked and answered in ways that churches didn't want them to be.

John Dehlin [01:15:03] And I remember. I think this happens before September 93. I remember on campus, like you said, this huge controversy over voice, you know, like marches on the Capitol by BYU students in support of a woman's right to choose. But then also, Gail Houston, the English professor, talking about praying to Mother in Heaven, maybe even starting a class with a prayer to Mother in Heaven. Cecilia Kanchar Farr, BYU English faculty promoting feminism and that sort of thing. And then there's David Knowlton, publishing and Dialogue About Latin America. He's gay. And I remember just this whole discussion about, you know, can they continue as BYU professors? Are they going to get kicked out? How free, as a scholar to research@ BYU versus a threat to the faith of its students. Do you want to talk about that? That happens before September 93 or maybe during.

Sara Patterson [01:16:09] It was 1992.

John Dehlin [01:16:11] Okay, right. The year before.

Sara Patterson [01:16:12] So the year before.

John Dehlin [01:16:13] Okay. Yeah.

Sara Patterson [01:16:14] And I think Farr is a really interesting example because she called herself a radical feminist.

John Dehlin [01:16:23] Faithful member, though, right?

Sara Patterson [01:16:24] Faithful member. And she didn't at the time see those two things at odds with each other. Looking back now, she sees that she was kind of compartmentalizing her feminism and her faith, but her radical feminism was leading her, as an English professor, to ask questions about who was being included in the canon, say, and trying to get more diverse authors recognized in college classrooms and things like that. And so. So her feminism was a very intellectual, discipline, specific feminism. But then in one of her classes, they were reading a Hemingway short story that talked about abortion. And students during the class discussion asked her how she felt about abortion, and she talked about how she disagreed with the church and. And was for a woman's right to choose. One of those students then asked her to speak at a rally in Salt Lake City. What's interesting about Farr is that she understood what that would mean for a BYU professor to be speaking at a pro choice rally. She spent some time thinking about it, and then she wrote her speech and showed it to her bishop and her stake president and said to both of them, you know me, and you know I'm a faithful member, and this is what I'm planning on saying. And so she basically got their approval to say to give the speech. Maybe approval is the wrong word, but they knew that she was going to give it, and she had showed it to them. And then as soon as she gave the speech and it was in the news, she was called in by her department chair and told that she couldn't speak on these issues. Again. They had some disagreements about whether or not BYU should be able to tell its employees what they could and couldn't speak on off campus at a public event. What ended up happening and led to her dismissal was there was a feminist newspaper in Salt Lake that asked to reprint the speech, and she said yes. And that was framed by the folks at BYU as going against what the department chair had just told her not to do. She ended up being dismissed.

John Dehlin [01:19:15] The. The. The conservative students at BYU disrespectfully called her Cecilia Gone Too Far.

Sara Patterson [01:19:25] Oh, wow.

John Dehlin [01:19:26] Had you ever heard that?

Sara Patterson [01:19:27] No, I hadn't heard that.

John Dehlin [01:19:28] Yeah. I mean, it was Cecilia Kancharfar. They called her Cecilia Gone Too Far. That was not me, by the way, but that's sad.

Sara Patterson [01:19:37] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:19:38] And again, Gail Houston for, like, talking about Praying to Mother in Heaven. And David Knowlton, he published an article about phallic symbols in Mormon architecture. I don't think the Brethren like that in Sunstone. It showed him a bunch of the church office building with the two globes on either side. And anyway, he also published about.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:19:58] If I could interject. Oh, sorry.

John Dehlin [01:20:00] Oh, I was just gonna say he also published about Latin American missionaries in, I think, Peru and terrorism and how the way the church sends missionaries, specifically Latin America, could. Would end up endangering them, I think things like that. Anyway. Rebecca.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:20:17] Oh, I was just going to say that I was an employee at the BYU library when all this was happening. I remember it very well. And I remember that there was discussion in individual departments. They were looking for direction from, you know, higher ups at byu. How do we handle this?

Sara Patterson [01:20:31] How.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:20:31] How much control should we and do we have over our employees? What can they do? What should they answer for? So it was definitely. It opened up a door to all of this in individual departments and just the university as a whole. So it was a really interesting time as we all watched somebody who was sharing their opinion, you know, and maybe a more formal setting. But what did that mean to us as employees? What could we do, or more importantly, not do, just as far as what we felt and the different organizations that we were involved in outside of campus. So it was really interesting to see all of that unfold in real time.

Sara Patterson [01:21:04] Yeah, I think that question of what academic freedom looks like on a religious campus is a really interesting one. And so I think it raises all kinds of questions about where limitations are for the people who work there.

John Dehlin [01:21:25] And I'll just say, personally, I remember huge campus battles about whether or not evolution should be taught. My professor, Bill Bradshaw, faithful Mormon, former mission president, former stake presidency members, teaching evolution as a part of his biology class. And there's students objecting that he's teaching evolution at byu. I remember Matthew Stannard complaining about the political conservatism of American heritage and talking about how it promoted American exceptionalism and like America being the one true country and how it ignored a lot of the atrocities that America had been involved with and yeah, just a lot of controversy in the student review. You mentioned it, the 17th East Press before, but these kind of off campus alternative newspapers that were fomenting progressive thought and progressive ideology. And it was just tense. It was just super tense to be at BYU during this time, I'm sure. Yeah. Okay, so how do we get from all this stew bubbling to a decision to go after six particular people in September of 93? I'm assuming Packer and Jepsen are two of the main characters. But let's now introduce, I guess, Maxine Hanks in her book and others, things that like, led immediately to September of 93.

The Individual Cases of the September Six

Sara Patterson [01:22:59] Yes, Maxine Hanks's book was one of the lightning rods for what happened in September 1993. And her book included, what's it called?

John Dehlin [01:23:14] Women in Authority.

Sara Patterson [01:23:14] Women in Authority. Thank you.

John Dehlin [01:23:16] No, I ask you questions on book

Sara Patterson [01:23:19] title, but Women in Authority is a really interesting set of essays about various topics tied to women and authority. And one of the things that Maxine says she was setting out to do was provide multiple voices about women's role in the church so that she would not, in the book, be suggesting that there was only one way that faithful people could view women. But the book D. Michael Quinn's arguments about women in the priesthood in the book. Margaret Toscano had an essay in the book caused a lot of concern for the hierarchy, in part.

John Dehlin [01:24:08] Do you remember what Margaret and Michael were saying in their chapters?

Sara Patterson [01:24:11] Yes, I remember most about what Mike Quinn was saying because that was part of his disciplinary proceedings. He was talking about the question of whether women had the priesthood in the early church.

John Dehlin [01:24:24] Okay. And this is one of the things that blew me away in my early years of Mormon stories when I learned about the article A Gift Given and a Gift Taken Away. Do you remember that enough to summarize it, or I can.

Sara Patterson [01:24:37] Why don't you go ahead?

John Dehlin [01:24:38] Well, what I remember is just learning that women, Mormon women exercised what we would call the equivalent of the priesthood in the early years of the church. Doing washings and anointings, blessing, doing priesthood blessings, healing each other, even with the anointing of oil, really significant exercising of what we would call the priesthood. And that was a gift given in the mid to late 1800s, or embraced or seized, I guess you could even say, by Mormon women. And. But then somehow, in the early 20th century, the brethren got nervous and took it all away. So I guess, I think Barbara was mentioning earlier that part of the purpose of Maxine's book was to say, hey, there's actually foundational underpinnings of feminism in Mormon history and doctrine and theology. Is that right?

Sara Patterson [01:25:32] Yes. So one of the claims of the book is that the idea that women have authority in a number of different ways is part of the restoration. And so they were pushing it back against this idea that feminism was an external threat. And I think that's one of the reasons that a lot of Mormon feminists at the time were working on history, because they were trying to find a tradition that could give them a sense of standing in a community that had been present and active all along. They saw in early Mormon women models for how to live a faithful life as strong women. But then they also wanted to make an argument that the restoration had given women spiritual authority that then had subsequently been taken away. And it was an argument that they had seen work in terms of with Lester Bush's article about black church members

John Dehlin [01:26:50] and the priesthood receiving the priesthood before the priesthood was taken away from black members. With Brigham Young.

Sara Patterson [01:26:58] Right, right. So his argument was that Joseph Smith had given the priesthood to black church members and that subsequent church leaders had not only taken that away, but had worked to create kind of a historical amnesia about the fact that it had been part of the restoration. And so the arguments for women receiving the priesthood were modeled on that idea that this had been a part of the restoration, that the restoration was a democratic vision, and that subsequent church leaders had made it hierarchical and had taken authority away from women.

John Dehlin [01:27:45] Yeah. And I can see how a patriarchal gerontocracy would be terrified by a book like that, but it strikes me that they're not saying. Maxine and the other authors of the book, they weren't saying the church is crap. They're not making women equal. The church is a fraud. Tear it all down. It's a faithful act to say, let's study our history, let's find equality in our theology and in our history, and let's just shine a light on it so that we can actually just restore what was already there. That's a fundamentally faithful act, in my opinion.

Sara Patterson [01:28:27] Yeah, I agree with you. And I think that that's what they believed they were doing. But that's also more dangerous than the people who say it's all crap and it all needs to be torn down.

John Dehlin [01:28:39] How so? Oh, I'm intrigued. How so? And then I want to get you

Sara Patterson [01:28:42] in, Rebecca, because they're accepting the foundation, and they're accepting that the church has spiritual authority and that it is the restored church. But they're suggesting that the restoration hasn't been. That the church has moved away from what the true restoration was. And that's a really powerful critique of an institution. Right. That's based on the idea that it's the true church. They were saying, well, you. It was. And now it's moved away from that

John Dehlin [01:29:13] because I was immediately. And, Rebecca, I want to get you in here. But I was thinking, well, that's one of the features that Mormonism builds for itself, ongoing revelation. But creating new things is different than the idea that we had some stuff lost. It kind of lost our way. And then in some sense, we have to restore the restoration. I guess that.

Sara Patterson [01:29:33] And that's why I think history telling was often the grounds on which these battles were fought. And I think from the outside, that might be counterintuitive. Why are people so concerned about how people are telling history? But it's because it's a restoration church, and so how people Tell history matters perhaps more than anything.

John Dehlin [01:29:55] Yeah.

Sara Patterson [01:29:56] Anything that can be characterized as new can be easily dismissed. Anything that is narrated as part of the foundation has to be really examined.

John Dehlin [01:30:10] Yeah. Rebecca, did you have a thought on. On any of this?

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:30:14] Yeah, I was going to say it is a very slippery slope. I think the church hierarchy sees that. And actually, just a few nights ago, I was on a podcast with Margaret Toscano about this exact topic. Joseph Smith and his teachings on temple, the priesthood, and women. This is a Gospel topics essay, and if you want to see how the church is dialing this back, read the Gospel topics essay. Because it just takes it way back. It was never given. We misunderstood exactly what was said and they just basically take it away. So of course they're going to view that as very dangerous. Somebody that understands the historicity of this concept of women having a sort of power in the beginning and. And obviously this is going to be more dangerous than somebody that's just, say, standing outside the conference center with a picket sign. No, this is an intellectual. And this person is going to be given credibility and listened to and can change minds.

Sara Patterson [01:31:03] Yeah. And Margaret has a great discussion of the Gospel topics essay and talks about. Frames it as a form of gaslighting. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:31:13] Yeah. I sometimes feel like the most sacred things in the modern Mormon Church are public image and authority, but mostly authority. And to claim that the brethren in any point lost their way and then, heaven forbid, needed women to kind of put them back on the right path. I mean, that really strikes to the heart of. Of authority, their authority, their divine authority. Right. Okay, so maybe let's. Let's list the six and talk about from your standpoint, what their offense, what their major offense was. Okay. Okay. We've talked about Avram. Yes, I think it was getting too popular, but also having his own cottage form of doctrine. I shouldn't even answer the question. Avram Gileadi, restate. His offense was.

Sara Patterson [01:32:07] I think that you're right. I think part of his offense was getting too popular with ultra conservatives, providing them with a way of reading scripture that reinforced what they were saying. So, yes, I would agree with that.

John Dehlin [01:32:25] Okay. Was there anything doctrinally incorrect? I know now we don't even know what Mormon doctrine is, but back then, was there a sense that he was actually teaching false doctrine? Avram Gileadi, what was the name of his book again?

Sara Patterson [01:32:41] The Last Days.

John Dehlin [01:32:42] Okay.

Sara Patterson [01:32:46] I think that the concern was that he was providing the evidence for people who were being declared doctrinally problematic.

John Dehlin [01:32:56] Okay.

Sara Patterson [01:32:56] Does that make sense? So the ultra Conservatives. His work was popular with them.

John Dehlin [01:33:02] People that would start practicing polygamy or doing those Manti temple ceremonies outside the temple, that sort of thing?

Sara Patterson [01:33:09] That's right.

John Dehlin [01:33:10] They were claiming Avram as their. His intellectual.

Sara Patterson [01:33:14] His book has a series of chapters about how what's happening in the world in the early 1990s is evidence that we are in the end times. And so he talks about rock and roll music. He talks about just various things in the culture as a sign of the end times.

John Dehlin [01:33:34] But also, as I read from your book, this idea of spiritual empowerment and that maybe the church isn't the real ultimate source. You need to get your own spiritual empowerment. Did I read that wrong?

Sara Patterson [01:33:50] I don't think I was saying that.

John Dehlin [01:33:51] Okay, okay. All right. Maybe I read that into it. All right. Okay. So that's Avram.

Sara Patterson [01:33:57] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:33:58] Did he have any conflicts with any of the leaders that you know of where he's like, someone's going to him, like Neal A. Maxwell, saying, hey, hey, chill out, stop this. You need to stop what you're doing. Was he warned?

Sara Patterson [01:34:10] He was warned. He was warned by his stake president. And he and his stake president came to an agreement that he would, in the future, kind of have his thing. Whatever he was publishing or speaking about, he would have read before his stake

John Dehlin [01:34:31] president would have read it.

Sara Patterson [01:34:31] Yeah, the city would approve it. And part of why he subsequently was excommunicated had to do with Malcolm Jepson as the leader of the Utah south area. And Jepsen was concerned about kind of ridding the church of these ultra conservative members that were kind of a thorn. He saw as a thorn in his side. And so he was not. He did not think that the agreement between Gileadi and the stake president went far enough. And so. He had the stake president removed, and then he put in a new stake president who was a religion professor at BYU who he knew would go further with Gileadi and excommunicate him, which is what happened.

John Dehlin [01:35:31] And I'll just refer our viewers and listeners to an early episode of Mormon Stories podcast with Christine Jeppson Clark. She's the daughter of Malcolm Jepsen, was singing the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, became a snufferite before she ended up leaving the church. It's definitely prior to kind of the YouTube age, one of the most popular and important episodes in the history of Mormon Stories podcast, because she talks about. Because Malcolm Jepsen was Boyd K. Packer's physician and best friend. And so what it was like to grow up with a dad who was A general authority who was best buddies with Boyd K. Packer and in some sense was Packer's hatchet. Fix it, man. Right. So please check that out.

Sara Patterson [01:36:14] That's a great interview.

John Dehlin [01:36:15] Oh, okay, Cool. Oh, wow. You've listened to more stories.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:36:18] I have.

John Dehlin [01:36:18] I love it at least once. That's good. I'll take it. I'm honored. Okay, so that's Avram.

Sara Patterson [01:36:24] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:36:25] Who's next? What do they do? You know, what was their offense, where they were?

Sara Patterson [01:36:29] Lynn Whitesides was a very active feminist in the church, and Lynn was a convert to the church and she loved the church, but when she went to byu, found the expectations for women there to be very restrictive. And she started to ask a lot of questions about why women were treated differently than men, why there was so much emphasis on women's purity and women being wives and mothers, and there was more emphasis on men as just faithful people. And so she had a lot of questions that continued to grow. And she kept experiencing. Because she was a woman who kind of spoke whatever was on her mind, she kept experiencing kind of backlash in her local communities about what she was saying and doing. And when she and her family moved back to Utah in the late 80s, she got caught up in the sunstone world and was part of the Mormon Women's Forum. She was part of a lot of those groups that the church hierarchy found dangerous. And she was asking a lot of questions about Heavenly Mother and about how the church treated women.

John Dehlin [01:38:04] And that seems so benign today. It's not like, like Tom Phillips revealing his experience with the second anointing or like, you know, somebody standing up and saying the Book of Mormon's a fraud, or even David Nielsen revealing the finances at Ensign Peak. It sounds like she's just asking some gender related doctrinal and theological questions and challenging Mormon culture, you know?

Sara Patterson [01:38:31] Absolutely was. She was also very outspoken. And so she gave an interview on the Salt Lake News where she called out Boyd Packer.

John Dehlin [01:38:42] Oh.

Sara Patterson [01:38:43] Named him, said that he wasn't acting in a Christlike way.

John Dehlin [01:38:46] So she criticized him publicly.

Sara Patterson [01:38:48] She did.

John Dehlin [01:38:49] Did she publish in Maxine's book? Was she one of the chapters in Maxine's book?

Sara Patterson [01:38:53] Yes. She did not.

John Dehlin [01:38:54] Okay, so her main sin was criticizing Packer. I mean, being a feminist and then criticizing Packer publicly. You think that's what got on the. The. On the. Yes, the list.

Sara Patterson [01:39:04] The list, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:39:05] Okay.

Sara Patterson [01:39:08] So that was Lynn Whiteside.

John Dehlin [01:39:10] Really quickly. Rebecca, did you have a comment or question about Lynn?

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:39:14] You know, I just think it's. It's so interesting because what you discuss in what she did. Like I said, I'm going through this whole series of gospel topic essays on a podcast, and it's clearly stated there in the. In the gospel topic essays now that, yes, mother in heaven, we can talk about her. You know, certain parameters, of course, but she's clearly mentioned and acknowledged. So it's just interesting that Almost everything these September 6th were excommunicated for now. It's fairly mainstream, I would say, in a lot of ways.

Sara Patterson [01:39:41] Yeah.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:39:41] Interesting.

John Dehlin [01:39:42] Yeah. Like all these preppers today are believing a lot of the same things Avraham was teaching. The church hasn't purged the preppers. You know what I mean?

Sara Patterson [01:39:50] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:39:51] Yeah. Okay. That's Lynn, who's third.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:39:54] Yeah.

Sara Patterson [01:39:56] I'm not going in chronological order.

John Dehlin [01:39:57] No, that's fine. No, that's fine.

Sara Patterson [01:40:01] Should we talk about maximum.

John Dehlin [01:40:02] Wait, Barbara's got a note. Barbara's got a note for us. She writes, she joked that she and other feminists were going to toilet paper the temple on the. On the TV program. That's a nice little fact.

Sara Patterson [01:40:15] After she said that Packer was not acting in a Christlike way.

John Dehlin [01:40:19] They're going to TP the temple.

Sara Patterson [01:40:21] She. She said it in a joking way. But part of what she was trying to communicate was she was saying that women had no recourse, so their ability to. One of the other things she said in that interview was all we can do is ask. There's no other way that we can go about this. And so I think that the toilet papering the temple was kind of showing the powerlessness of women at the time for bringing up those issues and getting a serious hearing about them.

John Dehlin [01:40:57] Yeah. I'm sure the brethren know that women are a sleeping giant in the church, and if you wake the sleeping giant, you're going to have problems. And they didn't want anyone waking the sleeping giant. Right.

Sara Patterson [01:41:08] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:41:09] Okay. Who's third? For the purposes of today?

Sara Patterson [01:41:13] Sure. We talked about Maxine and her book already.

John Dehlin [01:41:16] So she's the editor of this book.

Sara Patterson [01:41:18] She's the editor. And she also had an essay.

John Dehlin [01:41:20] Okay.

Sara Patterson [01:41:21] And one of the really interesting things about the introduction to the book, which she also wrote, was that it's very clear that she was trying to walk a line and that she was trying to frame, as you were saying, in a faithful way, how people could talk about women's roles in the church. But what's really interesting, I think, about Maxine is how much her own spiritual experiences confirmed to her throughout her life that what she was doing was important. And the right thing to do. So I think she's an example of somebody who used that idea of personal revelation to help guide her through kind of each step that she took.

John Dehlin [01:42:14] Okay, was there any. So she wasn't really criticizing the brethren per se or even teaching false doctrine. Correct that you.

Sara Patterson [01:42:29] Well, there were arguments in the book about women in the priesthood. And one of the things that she talked about in her essay was how when women go on missions, they go through a set of rituals that are akin to the priesthood rituals. And so she was talking about kind of that disjuncture between being given the authority to speak about your faith, but not being given as much authority as the other missionaries. And she talked about how, as she was growing up, the messages that she got from the church were all about her spiritual authority. And she really. That was a really meaningful part of her identity that she could have a personal relationship with God and speak with authority about her religion. And that's why she wanted to go on a mission. She wanted to represent her church, because for her, it had been such a freeing experience. And when she went on her mission is when she really encountered the patriarchy of the church and she realized that her authority wasn't the same authority as the male missionaries that she was with. And she really felt like she was kind of looked over in terms of leadership roles because she was a woman.

John Dehlin [01:43:56] Yeah. And I'm thinking now, in the past, after ordained women, the church has actually tried to upgrade the roles and responsibilities of women missionaries in the church. I'm just struck by, so far, three for three, how relatively benign their, quote, offenses were by modern standards. Right.

Sara Patterson [01:44:15] Yeah. And one of the things that Maxine has always joked about is, is that her excommunication gave her book a very long life when an academic book wouldn't have had.

John Dehlin [01:44:28] Would have been ignored.

Sara Patterson [01:44:29] Yeah. Would have been ignored and wouldn't, you know. And it's still being printed.

John Dehlin [01:44:35] Yeah. Okay. All right. Okay, that's three.

Sara Patterson [01:44:39] Okay. So now we need to move to Paul Toscano.

John Dehlin [01:44:44] Okay.

Sara Patterson [01:44:45] And in my chapter, I kind of think about the Toscanos together because.

John Dehlin [01:44:52] Meaning Paul and his wife, Margaret.

Sara Patterson [01:44:53] Paul and his wife Margaret. Because one of the things that Margaret has talked about is how initially the attention of the stake President was on her and what she was before Paul, before Paul, what she was writing about women's authority in the church and historically, and the kind of history and theology that she was investigating. And the two of them went to meet with the stake president, and Paul felt as though the stake president was kind of Going after Margaret. And so he kind of stepped in and started really challenging the stake president.

John Dehlin [01:45:33] He white knighted.

Sara Patterson [01:45:35] Yes, he white knighted. And. And so their attention then turned to him. And I think part of what. So both of them had been speaking publicly about questions that they had about the church, mostly at Sunstone. Yes. Yeah. So she had been writing about feminism. She had been writing about women historically and the divine feminine. Paul was asking questions about how much authority people were granting to the prophet. And he was concerned that church members were just kind of nodding along with whatever the church hierarchy was saying and weren't engaging with their faith in active ways. And so I think both of them were seen as a problem from the perspective of church leaders. What I would add is that in the stories that they have told about the meetings with the stake presidents, the stake president was frustrated with Paul refusing to kind of rein in his wife or suggest that Margaret should change her behavior based on what the bishop and the stake president were saying. And so I think in part, they, as a couple, they kind of modeled what was scary about feminism and egalitarian relationships, which is that they both have authority and they're not going to tell each other what to do. And so I think on a very personal level, they were also challenging kind of what the church's expectations were for what marriage should look like.

John Dehlin [01:47:23] Paul was failing to preside, and he was failing to be the head of the household. And that terrified.

Sara Patterson [01:47:29] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:47:30] The Brethren.

Sara Patterson [01:47:30] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:47:31] He couldn't keep his woman in line.

Sara Patterson [01:47:32] That's right. And she was refusing to let the bishop or the stake president hold. Hold her in line either.

John Dehlin [01:47:41] Are you laughing, Rebecca?

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:47:43] I am. It's that caveman mentality. Right. You gotta knock her down, drag her by the head and make sure that she's not saying anything that's not appropriate.

John Dehlin [01:47:51] Yeah, well, he was also a firebrand. I remember listening to some of those 92, 93 speeches. And he's like saying that the Brethren are like the Whited sepulcher and that the church is hollow and amen to their authority because they're exercising unrighteous dominion. Like, if anyone violated the third rail rule, don't criticize the Brethren. He might be first place still to this day as the most vehemently attacking of Mormon church leadership. And in that sense, I think he was inviting. If anyone was inviting excommunication, you might argue that it was Paul. Is that unfair? That's my view. I want to ask you to.

Sara Patterson [01:48:37] It's an interesting question. Who is inviting the post, but I think that you're right. He was very critical of church leaders. And I see a lot of what he was doing is trying to get people to be more active in their faith and to ask questions. I know that when the BYU professors were dismissed in 1992, he gave a talk saying, hey, BYU students and alum, you should care about this because this is about the value of your diploma and this is about academic freedom. He was always trying to drum up people's concerns about unchecked power. I would say. Yeah, yeah.

John Dehlin [01:49:20] Okay, so that's four, two left.

Sara Patterson [01:49:23] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:49:25] So Lavina, Michael and Lavina.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:49:26] Right?

Sara Patterson [01:49:26] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:49:26] Yeah, yeah. Lavina was Lavina Fielding Anderson, for those who don't know.

Sara Patterson [01:49:31] Yes. Thank you.

John Dehlin [01:49:32] Yeah.

Sara Patterson [01:49:34] She was challenging church leaders in a different way. She was talking about the abuses of power, of ecclesiastical power within the church. She wrote an article based on the talk that I mentioned earlier, where Eugene England stood up and had his outburst about the Strengthening Church Members Committee. She was giving talks at Sunstone and then wrote a paper for dialogue about the various ways that church leaders had abused their power. And so she was concerned about ecclesiastical abuse of all kinds, but the paper was about particularly ecclesiastical abuse of scholars and feminists.

John Dehlin [01:50:22] Was there also a sense of like sexual abuse or the COVID ups of sexual abuse, that sort of thing?

Sara Patterson [01:50:30] But that wasn't the primary concern in the article. That was the focus of her excommunication.

John Dehlin [01:50:35] And didn't she like name names? And this was published in dialogue, like a big old, like, that's kind of doxing. That's like the mor. Equal, the 90s equivalent of doxing. Naming names, calling people out. She was named as abusers.

Sara Patterson [01:50:50] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:50:50] That's pretty intense.

Sara Patterson [01:50:51] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:50:52] And, and she's, as I understand it, she's never stopped attending church, or at least she attended for decades.

Sara Patterson [01:51:00] She attended for decades.

John Dehlin [01:51:03] But, but so, so I don't know. I don't think of her as, as like this super radical, angry, shove stuff in people's face kind of woman. Right. She looks like your grandma at the, at the family reunion, you know, and probably talks like her too. Right.

Sara Patterson [01:51:22] Well, and again, that that's somebody who is all the more dangerous because she does when she's excommunicated, she keeps going to church. And she basically says to the church hierarchy, you don't get to define my relationship to God or to this community. And so I think, I mean, she went to reward meetings on Sundays because that community was really important to her. But I think there's also evidence there of a really stubborn trait of. I'm Going to be the one who decides what my identity is and what my relationship with God and community is.

John Dehlin [01:52:02] Yeah. I wonder if she was ever sued for defamation or libel or slander for naming names.

Sara Patterson [01:52:08] Not that I know of.

John Dehlin [01:52:09] So she must have had her ducks in a row.

Sara Patterson [01:52:11] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:52:11] I mean, she's a meticulous scholar, in my view. I mean, she's an editor, right?

Sara Patterson [01:52:18] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [01:52:18] Also a scholar.

Sara Patterson [01:52:19] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:52:20] So she wouldn't have named names lightly, I would probably say.

Sara Patterson [01:52:24] And she did try in 2018 to get her membership back in the church and was turned down.

John Dehlin [01:52:31] I think it was either a bishop or stake president that encouraged her.

Sara Patterson [01:52:35] Yes. They reconvened the council, and the council sent documents to the church hierarchy saying that we believe that this decision should be overturned.

John Dehlin [01:52:48] And they were denied.

Sara Patterson [01:52:50] And they were denied.

John Dehlin [01:52:51] So heartbreaking.

Sara Patterson [01:52:52] Yeah, yeah,

John Dehlin [01:52:54] yeah. Okay.

Sara Patterson [01:52:57] She was asked a series of questions. Part of the kind of application for membership was being asked a series of questions. And she did say in her response to that that she still disagreed with how the church treated women and its LGBTQ members.

John Dehlin [01:53:15] Oops.

Sara Patterson [01:53:16] So it may be that she had not shown. Demonstrated enough remorse for what had happened. I don't. I don't know. I mean, those documents aren't available to us.

John Dehlin [01:53:27] But, Rebecca, I was.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [01:53:30] I followed that story because I, you know, I could relate to her very much, and I thought it was interesting that she didn't seek this out. Her bishop and stake president sought it out for her and said, it's time to go back, and they helped her through the whole process. And then, like you said, it was denied. And I always wonder how that bishop and stake president felt at that point, because they had seen her in the ward, they had seen her being faithful, attending every Sunday for decades, thought she was ready to return, and then they were told no. And I always wondered what their perspective was on that.

Sara Patterson [01:54:01] She said in one of her accounts that the stake president, when he called her in to tell her that she was being denied re entry, read the letter in a really positive way, and he took it as the door is being opened, I want to say. And she did not take it that way. So maybe that was kind of a wishful thinking on his part. Maybe we've started the process and we just haven't finished it yet.

John Dehlin [01:54:34] Well, let's end with last but not least, Michael Quinn. D. Michael Quinn.

Sara Patterson [01:54:41] So Mike had. Been part of the historical community and the church for some time, and as a professor in the history department at byu, had caused a lot of problems from the perspective of the church. Hierarchy, especially Boyd packers, who felt like the way that he approached history with this. Our spiritual leaders. Our spiritual leaders, but also human, was dangerous to people's faith. Packer gave a talk about Quinn where he didn't name Quinn, but one of the things that he was that the

John Dehlin [01:55:30] mantle is far greater than the intellect.

Sara Patterson [01:55:32] Yeah. And one of the things that. That he says in that talk, which is really interesting, is he talks about how you wouldn't put first year in college into a graduate student course in chemistry. So he called it the principle of prerequisites. And so you shouldn't introduce this history that maybe shows the human flaws of prophets to people who don't have a fully formed faith, because you'll notice, knock them off the path. And so what Packer was saying was that what Quinn was doing was dangerous to the faith of other people. And at the end of the talk, he said, anybody who's doing that shouldn't expect to be employed by the church.

John Dehlin [01:56:17] Kind of a milk before meat thing.

Sara Patterson [01:56:19] Yeah. So Quinn had been writing history that was problematic from the church hierarchy's perspective for quite some time. And one of the things that was talked about in his disciplinary proceedings was the essay in Maxine Hanks's book.

John Dehlin [01:56:40] Right. Okay, go ahead.

Sara Patterson [01:56:45] I just wanted to add, in his journal, after Packer gave the talk about scholars and feminists and the gay lesbian movement, Quinn said something like, three strikes, you're out. So he understood that he was in all of the categories that Packer was saying were enemies of the church because

John Dehlin [01:57:11] he was an intellectual who was gay, who identified as a feminist.

Sara Patterson [01:57:14] That's right.

John Dehlin [01:57:15] Okay. I had heard that. That some of the other contributing factors were his listing of post manifesto polygamy, instances of post manifesto polygamy. I don't know if early Mormonism, in the magic worldview, did that come out after his excommunication, but then before. And then also just him being gay. I had heard that that could have contributed as well.

Sara Patterson [01:57:43] So one of the things that he talked about was how he was frustrated with the church, hiding aspects of itself from the public. And so I think one of the ways that he understood himself as a historian was kind of bringing to light things that people didn't know about the church's past and that church leaders would rather have. Would rather people didn't know. And so I think part of what Quinn was doing was trying to say, you need to be honest about your history, and people can still be faithful even with the honest and truthful history. And, of course, that was very threatening. To church leaders.

John Dehlin [01:58:28] And I'm hearing from Barbara that in Quinn's upcoming memoir, he writes that he was excommunicated for apostasy, not for being gay. So that's his perspective.

Sara Patterson [01:58:44] He had lots of messages that his sexual identity was not acceptable to the church hierarchy. So I don't want to discount that that was part of the issue. But officially what they were talking about were the historical arguments that he was making.

John Dehlin [01:59:04] And I'll just say my interview, my first interview with Michael Quinn is for me one of the most important interviews I did. I recommend people check it out. And inexplicably, in spite of being excommunicated and as being gay, he maintained his literal faith in golden plates and in the truthfulness of this church, as I understand it, to his, to his very death. So he, in spite of all of that pain and difficulty and punishment that he experienced, to the very end, he maintained it. He meant he remained a true blue faithful Mormon. Which is maybe even more tragic, I don't know, or inspiring?

Sara Patterson [01:59:50] Well, he often talked about himself as a kind of mystic. And so I think, I think in the end, his faith didn't rely on the institution. I think that he could maintain his faith outside of the institution and still see all the problems with the institution and say, there are spiritual truths here that are true for me, but I can experience them in my own life.

John Dehlin [02:00:15] I seem to remember him saying he believed that there were golden plates delivered by an angel too.

Sara Patterson [02:00:20] I'm not trying to say that. I'm just saying I don't, I don't know about framing it as a tragedy. I think that he, he had, I think he had a fulfilling life in terms of his spirituality after he left the church.

John Dehlin [02:00:36] Got it. Okay. Okay. So do you get the sense several of your chapters are kind of date based? Yeah, you know, there's, there's. My eyes are failing me. There's like September just kind of moving through the month of September, 14 and 19. And do you get the sense that, like, there was some strategy meeting at church headquarters where it's like, here's what we're going to do the month of September, we're going to go after these six people. Here they are, and here's how we're going to do it, or was it organic? Was it just a coincidence? Do you know anything about kind of was there strategy or tactics or even premeditation involved in the clustering in September of 93? And if so, who is involved?

The Strengthening Church Members Committee

Sara Patterson [02:01:20] I don't know that I can answer that in a Totally satisfactory way, because I don't have access to documents of what was happening in the church hierarchy at the time.

John Dehlin [02:01:33] The Boyd K. Packer journals, haven't you read them?

Sara Patterson [02:01:35] Yeah, no, not yet.

John Dehlin [02:01:36] The Malcolm Jepsen journals, you know.

Sara Patterson [02:01:38] Yeah, But I think that, you know, one of the things that's clear in Malcolm Jepsen's recounting of things, I think

John Dehlin [02:01:47] Christine did share maybe her dad's journal

Sara Patterson [02:01:50] with you guys, is that he says that he was instructed by the hierarchy to clean up shop in the Utah south region.

John Dehlin [02:01:59] Malcolm was.

Sara Patterson [02:02:00] Malcolm was. And so it's clear that the church hierarchy was giving instructions to people. It's clear that the Strengthening Church Members committee was operating as a way for the church to police doctrine at the local level, basically hand to the local officials what they needed to proceed with disciplinary actions. Quinn talked about how the timing of his own disciplinary proceedings and felt like there was a delay that may have happened so that it would happen in September and there would be kind of a big impact from that. But that, again, is anecdotal. And so I think it's clear that this was a time period where the church hierarchy was trying to send a message. But had they orchestrated it down to, on this day, this should happen to this person? You know, I don't know.

John Dehlin [02:03:09] Is there any indication that there was dissent in the quorum, even privately, that maybe Packer and Jepsen were kind of loose cannons, that they were acting more of their own motivation, and that there were other brethren that felt like this might have been a mistake or the wrong thing to do or bad for the church or inappropriate. But for apostles to be inserting themselves in matters of local church discipline.

Sara Patterson [02:03:41] There are statements from members of the church hierarchy about Packer as kind of an outspoken person who was hard to manage.

John Dehlin [02:03:51] The Grizzly Bear?

Sara Patterson [02:03:52] Yeah, the grizzly bear who made that.

John Dehlin [02:03:54] Was that Oakes? Who said that?

Sara Patterson [02:03:55] Oakes.

John Dehlin [02:03:55] Okay. What did he say? And was that with Bedson, you can't

Sara Patterson [02:03:58] manage a grizzly stage? Manage grizzly bear.

John Dehlin [02:04:01] That's what Oak said about Packer.

Sara Patterson [02:04:03] Yes.

John Dehlin [02:04:04] Meaning this guy. I can't control Packer. He's a senior apostle, and what am I going to do?

Sara Patterson [02:04:09] Right.

John Dehlin [02:04:09] Okay.

Sara Patterson [02:04:10] And so I think that it's clear that Packer, in many of the cases, was leading the way. But there were certainly people who could have pushed back more and harder. And I think publicly, the effect is the same that people were excommunicated. And in October 1993, the hierarchy issued a statement saying that we are responsible for the Doctrinal purity of the church. And that's why this happened. And so they were speaking with one voice in that regard.

John Dehlin [02:04:47] And it was a national story, as I understand it. It revolves. What, Time magazine.

Sara Patterson [02:04:53] Yeah. Starting with Lynn Whitesides, when she found out that she was going to have disciplinary proceedings. She actually called Lavina, who was her friend, who came over, and they talked about strategies for getting the press to come and the kinds of things that she would say to the press.

John Dehlin [02:05:13] But, I mean, it became a big deal nationally that. That started to impact the church's image. Is that fair to say?

Sara Patterson [02:05:21] Yeah, absolutely.

John Dehlin [02:05:23] Yeah. Yeah. So what. What can you say about. Oh, go ahead.

Sara Patterson [02:05:27] No, go.

John Dehlin [02:05:28] So what can you say about the aftermath? How did it affect the membership? How did it affect the lives of the people excommunicated? You know, what was the result? Did it have the desire. Did it have blowback that the church didn't expect?

Sara Patterson [02:05:44] Well, I think that especially in the immediate aftermath, there was just, like with Sonia Johnson, a chilling effect on Mormon feminism and Mormon scholarship and people's inquiry into the history of the church. So in that regard, it was successful from the church hierarchy's perspective. It's interesting to think about what happened in terms of the spiritual lives of the six, because they kind of went in all different directions. And I think Lynn Whiteside's experienced her excommunication as a kind of liberation from a patriarchal system. And so she just kind of continued her trek out of the church and never looked back.

John Dehlin [02:06:39] She's still around Salt, like, today. I talked to her on the phone, like, last year.

Sara Patterson [02:06:42] Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I. But I think she was kind of thankful that it happened, because she wasn't sure. Thankful might not be the right word, but she wasn't sure that she would have had enough strength to leave of her own accord. But this freed her to just leave and to realize that her spirituality was much bigger than the kind of spirituality that she felt the church was teaching.

John Dehlin [02:07:15] Okay.

Sara Patterson [02:07:17] And so would you like for me to go through kind of each one and how they.

John Dehlin [02:07:22] Yeah, yeah. As I understand, Avram went to Neal A. Maxwell and begged to get his membership back and got it relatively quickly.

Sara Patterson [02:07:29] Yes. He was rebaptized within a year and a half.

John Dehlin [02:07:33] That was the fastest.

Sara Patterson [02:07:35] It was the same church leaders who had excommunicated him. Who gets back in. Yeah. And I think he's an interesting example because his excommunication happened the way the church hierarchy would like for it to happen, because he said, okay, I done something wrong. And so in the future, I will do things differently, and I will do what you're asking of me.

John Dehlin [02:07:57] And I'm super sorry.

Sara Patterson [02:07:58] And I'm sorry.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [02:07:59] Yeah.

Sara Patterson [02:08:01] And so Jepson talks about how great this is, that this guy learned the error of his ways and he could be brought back into the church.

John Dehlin [02:08:10] Okay.

Sara Patterson [02:08:13] Maxine is an. An interesting person because she had spent part of her time after her missionary work kind of as an agnostic, but had some spiritual experiences before her excommunication that affirmed for her that she was going to be excommunicated and that what she was doing was the right thing. That the important thing was that this book was published. And so she continued to have. She entered into what she kind of frames as her Gnostic period of her life when she investigated Gnosticism as a religious tradition. She eventually came back to the church in 2013.

John Dehlin [02:09:09] Any idea why she was allowed, but Lavina wasn't.

Sara Patterson [02:09:14] So I think part of it has to do with who the local leaders are and then also what's happening in the church hierarchy. But in the end, I don't know the answer to that question.

John Dehlin [02:09:25] That's hard to say because Lavina's local leaders were in support of her being rebaptized.

Sara Patterson [02:09:30] That's right.

John Dehlin [02:09:30] Yeah.

Sara Patterson [02:09:32] So part of what's interesting about the story is that Maxine said to a friend of hers, I think I might be ready to come back to the church, but I don't really know how to navigate that. And so it was her friend who reached out to the church hierarchy and said, hey, is this a possibility that this could happen? And then the local leaders reached out to Maxine, and part of what she said was that she wasn't going to apologize for what had happened in 1993. She also said that she realized that the way that she was looking at the members of the church hierarchy was as enemies rather than as kind of brothers who were also trying to live out their faith lives. And so I think that that way of framing it, of not apologizing, but recognizing that everybody in the situation was trying to do their best and trying to be guided to make the best choices, was an interesting way of framing the story and may have helped church leaders see a way for her to reenter the church.

John Dehlin [02:10:51] So is it fair to say Maxine may have had more contrition and more empathy for the leaders, More contrition for her actions, maybe more humility and then more empathy for the leaders?

Sara Patterson [02:11:04] I'm not sure about the contrition part, but definitely the. The empathy and the she was, again, guided by the spirit, who said to her, you need to learn how to live in community, and this is the place where you can do it. And so she was really, I think, realizing that her actions around 1993 were not actions that were inviting to people forming relationships with each other. And so she really wanted to kind of change the way that she was behaving towards church leaders.

John Dehlin [02:11:43] Okay.

Sara Patterson [02:11:43] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:11:45] I don't know that we mentioned that Lyn was the only one of the Six that was disfellowshipped, not excommunicated. Is that right? Okay. Okay.

Sara Patterson [02:11:51] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:11:53] And maybe we mentioned it and I forgot it. So. Okay. And then that leaves Paul and Michael.

Sara Patterson [02:11:59] Yes. And so Paul left the church, and I think also didn't look back initially. There was some movement. The Toscanos asked about how they could maybe be part of the community again, but there was no interest on the part of the church hierarchy. And so he moved away from the church. And then Quinn is the one we haven't talked about. Well, I think we kind of have. He talked about himself as a mystic.

John Dehlin [02:12:31] Yeah. But remained a believer.

Sara Patterson [02:12:34] Yeah. There's a really excellent panel that dialogue put together of scholars today talking about the September Six. And one of the things that stood out to me that Amanda Hendricks Komodo talked about was how for a lot of people who are critical of the church, the September Six aren't always easy heroes, because so many of them remained faithful in one way or another. And so there wasn't this Lynn. I think Lynn and Paul would be examples of people who just said, the church is not a good place for me to be, and I'm moving away from that. But that's this more complicated set of relationships in the others makes them just ambiguous. Ambiguous. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good word for it.

Aftermath and Legacy of the September Six

John Dehlin [02:13:32] Okay, really quickly, is there a sense, like, with a lot of the modern excommunications I've seen in the past, like, 15 years, it's almost like the more excommunications they did, the more people that would leave. Was there an impact on the. The membership of people leaving in response to the September 6th excommunications that we know about?

Sara Patterson [02:13:57] Anecdotally, I. There were a number of vigils and meetings in support of various members of the Six, and people talked about passing around resignation roles, so requesting that people resign from the church.

John Dehlin [02:14:16] But was it a big enough number to kind of reach the significant status? I guess we wouldn't know because the church wouldn't make that available.

Sara Patterson [02:14:23] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:14:23] Okay. And Then there are other kind of honorary members of the September 6 that were excommunicated within a year or two that maybe deserve mention. We've kind of referred to them, but if you could just tell us kind of. Is Janice Allred one. Can we talk about who they are and just their offense really quickly?

Sara Patterson [02:14:45] Well, David Wright and Brent Metcalf for what they were arguing about Scripture, Book

John Dehlin [02:14:51] of Mormon historicity, that sort of thing. And Brent's book specifically. Did David publish in Brent's book?

Sara Patterson [02:14:57] Yes.

John Dehlin [02:14:58] Okay.

Sara Patterson [02:14:58] Yeah. He had an essay in Brent's book. He also had an article in Sunstone that was explaining historical criticism and explaining how he could maintain his faith while still asking these questions about the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [02:15:11] And we hope to have Brent Metcalfe on soon to talk about his book, New Approaches to the Book of Mormon. We've had him on before. Okay, so that's Brent and David Wright.

Sara Patterson [02:15:20] And then Janice Allred, you mentioned she was excommunicated. She was talking quite a bit about Heavenly Mother and asking questions about why the church wasn't talking about Heavenly Mother. And she made a lot of theological arguments about how Heavenly Mother could kind of be easily brought into the theology that the church was offering. She also was arguing that what was happening in the church was that the role of the prophet was starting to be seen as infallible. And so she was raising questions about seeing the prophet as an infallible person. And so both of those arguments were frustrating from the church hierarchy's perspective and

John Dehlin [02:16:09] so benign by today's standards.

Sara Patterson [02:16:11] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:16:11] Wasn't Janice Margaret's sister? Is that right?

Sara Patterson [02:16:14] Yes.

John Dehlin [02:16:14] Okay.

Sara Patterson [02:16:15] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:16:16] And what got Margaret in the end?

Sara Patterson [02:16:19] It's kind of hard to tell because she had been disengaged from her ward community for quite some time. And so she talks about her ultimate excommunication in 2000 as kind of a surprise. But

John Dehlin [02:16:34] it was 2000. It was seven years later.

Sara Patterson [02:16:36] Yeah. They did bring in the stake president that she and Paul had been dealing with to testify against her and her disciplinary counsel. And so. But what I wanted to say was she had been moving away from her community and starting to see herself maybe as Mormon in terms of identity, but definitely not a member of the church. And she started to write pretty critically about what she saw as, like, Mormon niceness, this idea that maybe is captured in church leaders arguments that disciplinary councils are being done out of love. And so she talked about how that was a really dangerous. This framing of everything in terms of nicest. It was a dangerous kind of cultural trend.

John Dehlin [02:17:31] Yeah. This language is a tiny bit graphic. But I remember in her PBS documentary, she described her excommunication as being raped by Care Bears, meaning, like stabbed in the back, as you're told you're loved. You know what I mean? And how spiritually, psychologically violent that is. And that's. As someone who's been excommunicated, that's what I felt, you know, very violent.

Sara Patterson [02:17:52] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:17:53] Disturbing. Rebecca, let's get you in. In terms of just any questions or thoughts you have, you know, in. At this juncture.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [02:18:02] At this juncture. Yeah. I was going to say that Margaret told me just the other day that was Paul who came up with that.

John Dehlin [02:18:07] Okay, cool.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [02:18:08] Care Bear phrase. Yeah. When she came back, because she didn't want him to attend, she went, described what happened. And he said that so very.

John Dehlin [02:18:16] Thank you. Thank you for that, Rebecca. That's good.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [02:18:19] Yeah, it's very interesting. So I think, to me, it's really interesting that there's no. There's no central sort of orchestration or authority to all of this as far as a person that's dissenting. These are all individuals that just in their own organic way, with their own particular, you know, issue that they're. They're. They're thinking about or they're concerned about, that they all. It's a. It's a from the bottom up kind of a movement. And to me, that's so interesting because I think the church looks at it like, oh, there's some kind of nefarious force at the top that's making everybody descend. And it's not. It's just people thinking, talking, questioning, trying to make things better. I think that's the bottom line there. So I don't know if you want to say anything about that, but that's just an observation that we had as we were discussing it in the book club.

John Dehlin [02:19:05] Well said.

Sara Patterson [02:19:06] Yeah, I agree with you. I think that there were certainly commonalities in what they were saying, but they weren't trying to create a united force against the church. They were having conversations and creating community around questions and issues that they thought were important. And part of what I argue in the book is that they ultimately were trying to suggest that the church shouldn't have purity as its key or core identity. And they argued instead of that, God was concerned about inclusivism and egalitarianism and the search for truth. And so they were offering a different vision to the purity system.

John Dehlin [02:19:58] Beautiful.

Sara Patterson [02:19:58] And they were arguing that that was the true church.

John Dehlin [02:20:04] Powerful. All right, so the book is. And again, stop right now buy this book, the September 6th and the Struggle for the Soul of Mormonism. We're interviewing Sarah Patterson. This is published by Signature Books. Really important contribution. The last chapter particularly has some really powerful analysis. Let me ask you about it in this way. So is it fair to say that the September 6th and those in the Sunstone Dialogue communities just lost the struggle for the soul of Mormonism? They basically lost. And the brethren. One orthodoxy, one correlation, one. Or is the story more complicated than that in terms of what followed and what's led to where we are now?

The Struggle for the Soul of Mormonism

Sara Patterson [02:20:54] I think that the struggle continues.

John Dehlin [02:20:58] Does it? Yeah, the struggle for the soul of Mormonism continues.

Sara Patterson [02:21:01] Really? I think that these arguments are still very much at play. And I think that the legacy of the six is there in the Gospel Topics essay. It's there in the changes that have happened in the church about the status of women. It's there in arguing that the true church has a more democratic set of experiences and that personal conscience and personal revelation are important sites of spiritual authority and spiritual knowledge. I think that the church hierarchy is still talking about purity and is very much concerned about purity. And I think that it's easiest to see that on BYU's campuses today. Again, as I said, it's not surprising that this is happening in higher education. And I think that byu, because it's imagined as this exemplar community, I think the question of purity there is perhaps the most powerful. There's a lot of efforts on the part. Part of the CES to make sure that people like D. Michael Quinn and Cecilia Farr aren't faculty at BYU today.

John Dehlin [02:22:38] Yeah. I would say BYU is more conservative now than it was 30 years ago.

Sara Patterson [02:22:44] Yeah, yeah,

John Dehlin [02:22:48] yeah. Rebecca, what do you have to say about the struggle for the soul of Mormonism? Them?

Rebecca Bibliotheca [02:22:54] Well, Hank, this morning about that, and we were talking about that subtitle and. And she was alluding to, you know, both sides kind of feel like they are in that struggle for the soul of Mormonism. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that, but which two sides? On both sides.

John Dehlin [02:23:11] Which two sides are you talking about?

Rebecca Bibliotheca [02:23:13] I would say the more postmormon or the intellectual. Those that have been excommunicated. And the other side would be. Be the church hierarchy. They are also feel that they're struggling for what they consider to be the soul of Mormonism.

Sara Patterson [02:23:26] Yeah, I think that shows us that it really is two different visions of what the true church is supposed to be. And I shouldn't say two. I think there's multiple visions of what the true church is supposed to look like in this situation. But sometimes it's easiest to characterize it as kind of two sides.

John Dehlin [02:23:47] Yeah. Right. Okay. Well, so I guess the struggle for the soul of Mormonism lives on. And I mean, to be honest, one of the things that's been. You know, I was talking to Barbara about this and with you a bit at lunch, that when I first bought my first microphone in 2005 and released my first episode of Mormon Stories podcast, the thing that came into my mind is, am I going to end up like the September 6th? I mean, that was what entered my mind. What also entered my mind before I. That made me buy the microphone was being inspired by them and those like them, and not just them, but like Grant Palmer and Simon Southerton and, you know, so many other important scholars that even B.H. roberts and Juanita Brooks and Fawn Brody, so many courageous scholars that stood up for truth and were paid a huge price for speaking up for truth. And all of that, all of those ghosts or spirits were. It felt like they were behind me as I was like, saying, let's try this with the Internet. You know what I mean? Let's see what happens with the Internet. Let's see if this game plays out a little differently of public criticism and. Or dissent or just candid, open public discussions. Let's see if this plays out differently when we add the Internet to the mix. And so that's what was on my brain 100% when I published my first episode of Mormon Stories. But what I learned really quickly is that by the mid-2000s, there's the blogger Nackle, there's times and Seasons, there's by common consent, and then there's this swell of people starting to question Mormonism. But you'd ask them, have you heard of September 6th? And they'd be like, no. Who's that? Have you heard of Maxine Hanks? You know, Lyn White? I probably wouldn't have even remembered Lyn White's sides by the mid-2000s, you know, and okay, Quinn, because he had written the books, but who are the Toscanos? You know, like, it's almost like to some degree, we forget really quickly as a culture. And by the mid to late 2000s, in a lot of Mormonism, the September 6 had been forgotten, which was revolting to me. And it's partly why I've mentioned them as often as I could on the podcast and tried to interview. Maxine wouldn't come on. I'm still hoping someday she would. Lavina Wouldn't. Come on. I had no way to contact Lynn, but I was, you know, I was able to get several of the others, or at least a couple of the others. Avram wouldn't, obviously, but. But I guess I'm really frustrated at how we forget as a people the heroes that make what we're experiencing now, that made what we're experiencing now possible, including Sonia Johnson, including Leonard Arrington, including, you know, so many others. And that's. That's why I'm so glad you wrote. You wrote this book, and I'm so glad Signature Books published this book. And I'll give a thanks to Barbara Brown and all those at Signature that's supported her is we. How can we forget our heroes? How can we forget those people that came before us, that made what we're experiencing now possible? And there would be no Mormon stories or John Den. And I'm just speaking for me, without the September 6, without Sunstone, without dialogue wouldn't exist. Right.

Sara Patterson [02:27:48] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:27:50] And we need to remember these people. And any goodness that's happening now stands on the shoulders of these giants, along with so many other people. Feminists, intellectuals, gay people, scholars and activists. Carolyn Pearson, so many people. And so I am so grateful that you and Signature Books made this book possible to help us not forget the shoulders that we stand on. And I hope we can remember them. And you writing this book as an outsider in a year with such wisdom and eloquence and insight, and I think I said this to you at lunch, is a tremendous gift to our people.

Sara Patterson [02:28:48] Oh, thank you for saying that.

John Dehlin [02:28:50] So thank you.

Sara Patterson [02:28:51] I think you're right that it's important to remember people who didn't accept what was handed to them about their faith, but really worked to make it their own.

John Dehlin [02:29:02] Yeah.

Sara Patterson [02:29:02] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:29:02] Were you inspired by learning about these. These people?

Sara Patterson [02:29:06] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [02:29:07] Yeah.

Sara Patterson [02:29:07] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [02:29:08] Yeah.

Sara Patterson [02:29:10] I think there's a letter that Diane Wright, so David Wright's wife, wrote to their stake president that, I don't know, just captures in my mind kind of the power of what these dissenters were doing. And she talks about how Joseph Smith, at kind of the basic level, was someone who was seeking the truth, and he was willing to go wherever that journey led him. And so she was saying to the stake president, that's what my husband is doing, too. And I just think that's a really powerful statement about these dissenters. I think they were trying to find truth and they were willing to follow their questions in that journey. And I think that's a very brave act.

John Dehlin [02:30:07] Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, Please buy this book immediately. The September 6th and the struggle for the soul of Mormonism. Sarah Dr. Sarah Patterson, Signature Books. The next book we're going to be covering is Barbara Brown and Rick Turley's book, Vengeance is Mine. Vengeance is Mine. Rebecca's got it held up.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [02:30:35] I've got it.

John Dehlin [02:30:35] Go buy this right now as you're buying the September 6th. Anything you want to say, Rebecca?

Rebecca Bibliotheca [02:30:43] I'm covered with books. No, I just want to thank Sarah again. I mean, it really is time, 30 years later for this book to come out so that we can study it in context and then find meaning in it today and understand the A lot of us are where we are today because of the people in this book. So I would tell our book club members, even though we've already had this meeting and discussion with the author, we'll continue to discuss it on our Facebook page. And so please buy the book and we will keep the dialogue going. And then this book next. I believe we'll be doing it at some point in October, maybe early November. But this is also available on audio. So go grab this and let's start diving in. This is going to be a really interesting meeting.

John Dehlin [02:31:21] I love it. Also, I'll give a shout out. Thank you, Rebecca. I'll also give a shout out to our local bookstores. There's some amazing local bookstores that provide Mormon books that also host gatherings and author meetups with so many of our authors, whether it's Signature Books here in Salt Lake City, Written Vision down in Provo, I believe. Also Sam Weller is a local bookstore. And what's the one on like 13th and 13th King's English. So Benchmark. What did I say? Signature. Oh my gosh. Benchmark Books. Chris Bench is currently leading Benchmark Books. It's a phenomenal place. And like Sandra Tanner's UTLM used to be, it's a great place to visit when you're in town. Check out Benchmark Books and Chris Bench and you can meet Brian Buchanan while you're there. He's amazing. And I'm sad that Ann Wilde retired. And again, thanks to the Smith Petta foundation and Signature Books for I mean, they've got a lot of people excommunicated, but that wasn't their intention. They've published so many amazing, scholarly, thoughtful, balanced, fair books that have shaped, you know, talk about standing on the shoulder of giants. Gary Bergera, you know, Ron Ron Priddis and George Smith and all the good people at Signature Books have just we wouldn't be where we are without Them so huge. Shout out to them and to Barbara Brown. All right, Sarah Patterson, what's next for you? You any idea? Do you know yet?

Closing Thoughts and Farewell

Sara Patterson [02:33:08] I'm giving a talk at Salt Lake City Public Library tomorrow night.

John Dehlin [02:33:12] Okay. And then, like, in terms of scholarship,

Sara Patterson [02:33:15] I knew that's where you were going, but I'm not ready to say it. I'm resting a little bit.

John Dehlin [02:33:21] Yeah, well, it's well deserved.

Sara Patterson [02:33:25] Oh, at. At Hanover College, we've started a new social justice leadership program. And so I received. Received an endowed professorship in social justice education. So I'm going to be working on that.

John Dehlin [02:33:37] Oh, excellent.

Sara Patterson [02:33:38] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:33:38] Congratulations.

Sara Patterson [02:33:39] Thank you.

John Dehlin [02:33:40] All right. And we hope maybe you'll do another book on Mormonism one of these days.

Sara Patterson [02:33:45] Yes, we were talking about that at lunch today. We were, yes.

John Dehlin [02:33:49] Oh, yeah.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [02:33:49] Okay.

John Dehlin [02:33:50] All right. All right. Well, thanks again, Sarah. Dr. Sarah Patterson. Thanks to everyone. Thanks, Rebecca. Rebecca, any final words from you? Thanks for all the good work you did. Do you want to plug Mormonish really quick and the Good Book Club and all the good things you do?

Rebecca Bibliotheca [02:34:05] Yeah, sure. I'd love to. So in addition to helping John with the Mormon Stories Book Club, I also run with my co founder, Landon Brophy, the Good Book Club, where we read a book a month and we have a virtual meeting every second Sunday. It's Demon Haunted World this month.

John Dehlin [02:34:19] Carl Sagan. Carl Sagan, yeah.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [02:34:21] Carl Sagan. Wow. This is the Book of All Books, I'm telling you.

John Dehlin [02:34:24] That's one of my favorite books of all.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [02:34:26] Join this. Yeah. Find us on Facebook, the Good Book Club, and just zoom in. We have people from all over the country and we just discuss good books and then Mormonish podcast. We just dropped an episode today talking to a former volunteer with our very interesting. Excuse me, I'm coughing. Very interesting. So. Yep.

John Dehlin [02:34:45] Did they. Did they use their name? Did they use their name or did they go by a synonym? Or was it anonymous?

Rebecca Bibliotheca [02:34:51] No, it's. It's interesting. It's a person named Monique Durer that we'd had on the show before, and then I had no idea that she had that background. She has a PhD and she's highly involved in all kinds of, you know, social work and rescue kinds of things across the world. And she was a volunteer early in 2016, and we just made that connection and had her on just to kind of tell her experiences. So that just dropped today. Pretty interesting. So. But again, John, thank you so much for the opportunity to help you with the book club. I just love it. I think it's so important for a post Mormon for anybody to just, just, you know, kind of read your way back to sanity, if that makes sense.

John Dehlin [02:35:25] I love it.

Rebecca Bibliotheca [02:35:25] So thank you.

John Dehlin [02:35:26] Yeah. And again, vengeance Is Mine is the next book by it Now. We can't wait to have Barbara Brown here to talk about the Mountain Nose Massacre, which is a great read. I'm reading it right. I'm listening to it right now, but you can read it or listen to it. Anyway, thanks so much for joining us today. Thanks to all the donors that make Mormon Stories podcast possible. If you value the book club or any of our episodes, you can always become a monthly donor. At MormonStories.org, click on the donate button. Become a monthly donor, and we'll be able to keep providing you with this content. If you're an author and you've got a phenomenal book and you think the world needs to read it, feel free to reach out and let us know. And we're super excited for all the stuff that's coming up. Big stuff's coming up. So thanks to everyone who supports us. Be good to each other, be kind to each other there, and we'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories Podcast. Take care, everybody.

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