He Said: Active Members Interacting with Anti-Mormons

Anti-Mormons have always served a inculcating function in the LDS doctrinal and history arena. There has to be an opposition in all things and their desire to disseminate materials has contributed to the LDS research community at BYU. I have had mixed feelings about them. I have not agreed with their purposes or intentions but I would be a hypocrite to say I haven't benefitted from their desire to share material. It was a two-edged sword to associate with them since you had to be firm in the faith but even the institutional church or archives has had dealings with them over the years as manuscripts and other items have come from them. Even my bosses at BYU visited them from time to time when I worked there for seven years.

When I was a graduate assistant at the BYU religion department I worked in an office with four other graduate assistants. One of the assistants was a young man that was excommunicated prior to his coming to BYU. He told me his story as a cautionary warning or tale. He said on his mission he got a hold of Jerald and Sandra Tanner's Mormonism Shadow or Reality. I remember also on my own mission seeing it but I just laughed at it because it employed underlining as a way of pointing out what they considered ridiculous or false Mormon teachings. I never took it too seriously. My desk mate said he also felt the same way and that his intention when he started was to refute all their doctrines which he spent a great deal of mission doing.

When he came home he became obsessed with collecting any and all anti-Mormon writings and had hundreds of them that was why he was such a good researcher and was hired to work later with us in the BYU religion department. He said that he subtly began to lose his faith little by little as he couldn't answer all the objections he began to find. Eventually he lost his faith and began to doubt the church was true and apostatized. He was eventually called in and was excommunicated. Then after he was out of the church he realized what had happened to him and he repented and was able to come back and be reinstated. His most important point that he shared with me was being critical of the church doctrines and leaders leads to personal apostasy.

His story really had an impact on me and sobered me up to the fact that it is easy to lose your way when you begin questioning the doctrines of the church. I vowed in my life in light of his personal example and listening to Elder Boyd K. Packer's talk the Mantle is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect to not be one of the critical historian types.

I don't go out of my way to associate with anti-Mormon types but I have encountered them anyway. My treatment of them is similar to what I read while on a mission in an address by Mark E. Peterson about Jehovah Witnesses. He said that they are sincere people but sincerely wrong. I have respect for people including anti-Mormons for their sincere desire to enlighten me to the doctrines that they feel are wrong and I have taken their literature and looked at it but for the most part I either see through the distortions or I say it isn't essential to my salvation.

Even when I worked at the BYU religion department I had access to all the papers that Russell Rich had his graduate students do such as visiting every fundamentalist or splinter group and doing an advanced religion or history paper on them. At the Mormon History Association Meetings I listened as an enamored Scott Faulring and Mark Grandstaff had Lawrence Foster in our room for hours telling them about the Millenarian connection of Mormons with Shakers in Ohio or had them force me to befriend Earnest Strack. I never went beyond talking to Earnest but I recognized his sincere desire to unveil what he thought were hidden doctrines of Mormonism. He would stop me on the street as I walked by his shop and say do you want a copy of L. John Nuttall's diary or the Second Anointing compilation or John Taylor's Robes of the Priesthood. I would say thanks Earnest but I don't want to waste my money on it. I don't really want it. He would then said don't worry about money I will give you one free. Me I took whatever I could get free. I even collected hundreds of books every Friday off the Harold B. Lee Library cart when they wouldn't sell and the sign said free. I got a 1790 book and dozens of LDS books off that cart. Sometimes I took Earnest's offering and other times I said no thanks. I always felt a tad uncomfortable with Earnest pushing his stuff on me but most of the other history majors couldn't wait to trade with Earnest. I never once gave him anything but many of my fellow students would do research and feed him their latest finds. I know for a fact even history and religion professors did it by feeding it to their students who feed it to Earnest.

I ended up with them many times later from Faulring or some other history major would manipulate my bosses in the history or religion department to give them copies of legitimate stuff like Wilford Woodruff's potteries diaries and as repayment they would give me to give my boss some other document. I didn't really even look at the stuff for years until I sold my copy collection years later to a book dealer. My wife on the other hand thought it was fascinating and interesting stuff.

I have always seen the anti-Mormons from Ogden Kraut to Jerald and Sandra Tanner to Michael Marquart as being the enemies of the Church. I met the Tanner's once through one of my bosses in the religion department who stopped one time to talk to them and another time on the way to the MHA the guys I was staying with made me stop by and see Sour Kraut and later hooked up with Marquart. I wasn't impressed by either since they brushed off the people I was with. They considered themselves to busy to answer their inquiries. Marquart was fixated on sharing the surreptious temple transcript he made using a recorder.

The interesting thing was that many so-called faithful Mormon students were enamored of these people and others like Gary Bergera and Elbert Peck. From time to time I would run across them since they were contemporaries. I personally didn't get on the worship train or the folk hero syndrome. I recognized that they served a useful purpose in getting out the hidden sources. When Lyndon Cook and Andy Ehat lost their Joseph Smith material right out of an office in the religion department at BYU I had a good clue who took it since one of the underground admitted he got it from the person or church leader who used the office and had taken it. My acquaintance didn't want Ehat to know there were more involved than the one guy. I had nothing to do with it. I tried to tell Ehat about the Kabal but he was in denial at the time and the guy who told me he was involved denied he had taken it to Ehat which was technically correct but also a subtle lie since he had copies of his stuff. It was like the Giadianton robbers as documents in the BYU special collections, the religion department, and the history department were slippery and made their way to the anti-Mormons and scholarly Mormons whose purpose was to blow the lid on sensitive materials and open up the sources or own them secretly.

I have always felt we should limit our interactions with the Anti-Mormons and dissidents. But Russell Rich and other BYU professors have been of a mind that we should get to know them. Reed Benson would say it was better to know the "enemy." When I worked for Lamar Berrett he had copies of all of Rich's students papers. His graduate students went out to every major offshoot or fundamentalist group in the 1960s and 1970s and did graduate religion papers on them. I made copies of them but most of the people are now deceased. My wife threw them and about a ton of paper I had in the landfill in California when I lived there in 2000. The rest of my stuff I sold later to a Utah book dealer. My wife has become enamored with the fundamentalists and wants to know all their secrets. I on the other hand don't think it is worth bothering with.

In the 1970s and 1980s with the excommunication of the September 6 group and others of their ilk. Elder Packer seem to suggest through his hard disciplinarian approach that if we valued our membership we should avoid the critical school. In the 2000s the church developed a kinder and gentler approach as more and more people who weren't around in the Arrington years began to attend conferences like Sunstone etc. Now a days there are more conservatives who have no clue about the the previous decades and attend them. I on the other hand still have a reluctance since I remember my desk mate's warning and have never once attended any of the Anti-Mormon attended conferences or meetings like Counter-point or Sunstone. I just don't feel uplifted by examining a bunch of old chestnuts like Adam-God, Polygamy etc.