Purity at What Price

Purity in religion is an elusive prize. Just ask the Lutherans. From the birth of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (LCMS) in 1847, its rallying cry was reine Lehre (pure doctrine), as defined by president and founder C. F. W. Walther. For him, that meant a dogged insistence on an infallible Bible and Luther's own teaching, uncorrupted by later rationalism. But by the late 1960s, some LCMS conservatives suspected that rationalism and liberalism, especially skepticism about the literal truth of scripture, were being taught in the denomination's seminaries. After Jacob A. O. Preus became president of the LCMS in 1969, he appointed a fact-finding committee to root out “higher criticism” of the Bible and other heresies among the seminary faculty. The chief target was the denomination's flagship, Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, led by John Tietjen, an outspoken proponent of ecumenical relations with more liberal Lutheran bodies. Between December 1970 and March 1971, the committee interviewed all the Concordia professors, probing their views on the literal truth of such biblical stories as Adam and Eve, Jonah and the whale, and the resurrection of Jesus. Ultimately, the inquest led in 1974 to the ouster of Tietjen, the departure of forty of the forty-five faculty, and the withdrawal of more than two-thirds of the seminary's students. The dispute also split the LCMS, the second-largest Lutheran denomination in the United States, resulting in the exodus of about 250 congregations and 550 pastors. In the words of historian Martin Marty (who himself left the LCMS amid the battle), never in the twentieth century had “a large church been so savagely torn.”1Even as Lutherans were fighting over orthodoxy, the Latter-day Saints were embroiled in their own internal conflict over purity, a story that deserves more attention in the historiography of American heresy-hunting. That gap has now been filled by Sara M. Patterson's The September Six and the Struggle for the Soul of Mormonism, the first monograph on the subject.2 While ostensibly about the six intellectuals who were excommunicated or otherwise disciplined by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints over thirteen days in 1993, Patterson's book is actually a history of the ongoing skirmishes over orthodoxy that have dominated the church from the 1970s to the present. Combining meticulous research in published sources with firsthand interviews, Patterson has produced an indispensable volume for everyone interested in recent Latter-day Saint history. The book forces us to grapple with broader questions about boundary maintenance and the nature of religious authority—questions that the Mormon tradition, with its provocative claim of ongoing revelation, throws into stark relief.What caused modern Mormonism to be so convulsed? For Patterson, the struggle was about purity, defined by church officials as a threefold orthodoxy of doctrinal, familial, and bodily conformity. The battle lines were drawn in a May 1993 speech to the All-Church Coordinating Council (ACCC) by Apostle Boyd K. Packer, who would become acting president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles a year later. Packer identified the three greatest threats to the church as intellectuals, feminists, and the “gay-lesbian movement.” On doctrine, according to Packer, intellectuals were failing to defer to the Brethren (the church's General Authorities), usurping their prophetic authority to receive revelation. On the family, Packer alleged that feminists were encouraging women to be discontented with their principal role as homemakers and mothers. On the body, he accused gay and lesbian activists of spreading “gender disorientation” in opposition to the church's contention that the gender binary was grounded in humans’ premortal state. To correct these errors, Packer hailed the principle of “correlation,” the church's name for the standardization of teaching across its curricula and other publications. “If we neglect it,” he warned, “we will pay a very, very heavy price one day.”3 As Patterson points out, Packer was preaching to the choir since the ACCC was the church unit responsible for correlation. The ACCC's importance had grown considerably during the presidency of David O. McKay (1951–1970), when the church tripled in size and correlation became a way of maintaining purity in a far-flung, global institution.The concern over purity had been building for more than a decade before Packer's talk. A major source of anxiety was second-wave feminism and the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which passed Congress in March 1972 but required ratification by thirty-eight states. In Utah, leaders of the Relief Society lobbied the legislature against ratification; in 1976, the First Presidency weighed in, saying that the ERA would harm the family and “even stifle many God-given feminine instincts” (90). Two failed ratification efforts in Utah did not deter supporters of the amendment, who formed an organization, Mormons for ERA, under the leadership of Sonia Johnson. Johnson became the face of Mormon feminism after clashing with Utah senator and Latter-day Saint Orrin Hatch in a Senate subcommittee hearing in 1978. Her speeches raised the ire of the church's hierarchy, as did her organization's hiring of an airplane to fly a banner over the October 1979 General Conference that read “Mother in Heaven loves Mormons for ERA.” By then, she was in the sights of her local bishop, who summoned her to a disciplinary proceeding in November. Her excommunication on December 5, 1979, only raised her profile among church members and nationally.Patterson is not alone in regarding Johnson's case as pivotal. Historian Benjamin Park writes that Johnson's trial was the “church's Rubicon” that “inaugurated nearly two decades of cultural clashes fought in the public sphere to preserve traditional authority.”4 But what Patterson's account shows is how intertwined were the purity system's three pillars (doctrinal, familial, bodily) in Mormonism's age of anxiety. Johnson came to understand the truth of theologian Mary Daly's dictum that “if God is male, then male is God.”5 As Patterson puts it, Johnson “realized that the way communities imagined the divine realm shaped and structured hierarchies of the social realm” (99). Johnson argued that achieving equality for women in the family and workplace required elevating the Heavenly Mother doctrine, an idea long present in Latter-day Saint thought but typically downplayed by church authorities.The doctrine also impinged on debates over bodily purity, especially after the founding in 1977 of Affirmation, an organization for gay rights in the church. Shortly after being sustained as a member of the Quorum of the Twelve in 1984, Dallin H. Oaks sounded the alarm, arguing that “one generation of homosexual ‘marriages’ would depopulate a nation, and, if sufficiently widespread, would extinguish a people” (141). In a talk at Brigham Young University three years later, he appealed to the doctrine of the plan of salvation, noting that God had rejected Satan's scheme to take away the free agency of spirit beings. Because people in mortal existence retained this free agency, same-sex desires were like an addiction that persons had the power to choose or reject. Oaks again invoked the plan of salvation in a 1995 article in Ensign, this time arguing (ironically, in an implicit appeal to the Mother in Heaven) that the male-female binary is an essential characteristic foreshadowing humans’ eventual exaltation to be like their heavenly parents. Mormonism's distinctive doctrines, in other words, raised the stakes of fights over familial and bodily purity, elevating them to eternal significance.Patterson's account also shows the importance of history—of finding a usable past to undergird particular visions of the restoration—for all parties in the purity debates. History came dramatically to the fore in 1973 when Lester E. Bush Jr. published an article in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought claiming that Joseph Smith did not limit priesthood eligibility by race, contradicting a 1949 statement by the First Presidency that the “attitude of the Church with reference to Negroes remains as it has always stood” (23). Though the church would open the priesthood to Black men by 1978, the Bush article prompted greater scrutiny of historians, whose work was a potential “faith destroyer,” according to Boyd Packer (34). When the LDS Church History Department, led by church historian Leonard Arrington, published The Story of the Latter-day Saints in 1976, some in the hierarchy felt that the book relied too much on anti-Mormon sources or naturalistic, rather than miraculous, explanations.6 Over the next several years, Arrington saw his department gradually circumscribed and his own authority constrained. By 1982, the General Authorities canceled the multivolume church history that he had planned.Patterson allots four insightful chapters to these background struggles of the 1970s and 1980s before devoting a separate chapter to each of the September Six. The one exception is Avraham Gileadi, a scholar of Hebrew scripture, whom she discusses in her earlier section on doctrinal purity. Gileadi is an anomaly, the “least Sixish of the September Six,” as Patterson puts it (72). His excommunication stemmed not from liberal tendencies but from his idiosyncratic interpretations of ancient prophecies, as explored in such publications as The Last Days, a bestselling book on the end times.7 After expressing contrition and promising not to speak publicly about the offending topics, he was rebaptized into the church in 1996. Gileadi subsequently distanced himself from the other September Six, pointing out that while they “pleaded their cause in the media” and “thus embarrassed the church, I never did so” (81).The collective dissent by the other five of the Six amounted to a liberal challenge to the church, Patterson contends, albeit one that was “heterogenous, offered in fits and starts, and never unified” (154). Still, she discerns some common themes, including an emphasis on “experience and personal conscience as important and authoritative sources of knowledge.” In place of the church's insistence on purity as defined by the institution, the dissidents argued for greater “openness, inclusion, truth-seeking and telling, and personal relationship” (155).The first of the Six to be disciplined, feminist Lynne Kanavel Whitesides, was also the only one to be disfellowshipped, a step short of excommunication. A convert from Lutheranism, Whitesides argued that women were being marginalized by Latter-day Saint theology, especially in the hierarchy's attempts to curtail discussion of Heavenly Mother. After Whitesides appeared on a Utah television station discussing Mormon feminism, she was summoned to a disciplinary council. Allowed to call witnesses on her behalf, she enlisted Lavina Fielding Anderson (one of the Six) and Margaret Toscano, both of whom were eventually excommunicated. Whitesides, who later embraced feminist ecotheology, told Patterson that she has since made a break with the “patriarchal weird world” of the LDS Church (175).Whitesides's alienation contrasts with another of the Six, feminist scholar Maxine Hanks, who drew fire from the authorities for her edited book Women and Authority: Re-emerging Mormon Feminism.8 Hanks recounted to Patterson how her excommunication was the wrong strategy for the church if the goal was to suppress her work. “It put me on Nightline, PBS, CNN,” she said. “It made the book famous” (203). She even won a fellowship at Harvard Divinity School. Hanks eventually wrote a conciliatory letter to the First Presidency acknowledging that “the one mistake I made was that I didn't realize that you guys were my brothers” (208). She was rebaptized into the church in 2012.Two of the Six, Lavina Fielding Anderson and Paul Toscano, were leaders in the Mormon Alliance, founded in 1992 to document cases of “ecclesiastical and spiritual abuse,” which the group defined as religious coercion, intimidation, belittlement, or other attempts to suppress or attack a person's views. In 1993, Anderson, who had earned a PhD from the University of Washington and was coeditor of Sisters in Spirit: Mormon Women in Historical and Cultural Perspective, published an article in Dialogue documenting a number of such cases involving feminists and other intellectuals.9 When her ecclesiastical leader called her in, she was defiant, telling him that “I will always be a Mormon, whether I am a member of the Church or not” (247). After her excommunication, she wrote a thirty-seven-page appeal to the First Presidency to be rebaptized but was rebuffed. Years later, in 2019, the Salt Lake Liberty Stake High Council unanimously recommended her reinstatement, but the First Presidency again rejected the appeal. Anderson died in 2023. Her essays were collected in Mercy without End: Toward a More Inclusive Church.10Toscano, meanwhile, was an attorney who coauthored Strangers in Paradox: Explorations in Mormon Theology with his wife, Margaret.11 Both had been involved in Sunstone, an independent magazine (with symposia of the same name) that often featured liberal Latter-day Saint perspectives, as well as VOICE, a feminist group that began on the BYU campus. After Margaret gave a talk to VOICE on female images of the divine, Boyd Packer met with her stake president, Kerry Heinz, who in turn met with Margaret and then both Toscanos. Paul later admitted that he made the situation worse by being disrespectful and accusing Heinz of spiritual abuse. He recalled berating Heinz, a real estate agent: “It's insulting that you're sitting across from us questioning our theology. What's your theology? It's a vacant lot!”12 A month later, Paul was excommunicated. The letter stated that “you have gone too far, become too critical of the Lord's anointed, and have expressed too strongly personal beliefs that cannot be supported by scripture” (229). Margaret, who continued to write about Heavenly Mother and women in the priesthood, was excommunicated in 2000.The last of the Six to be excommunicated, D. Michael Quinn, has garnered considerable attention since his death in 2021.13 An important figure in the New Mormon History pioneered by Leonard Arrington, Quinn was trained at Yale as a secular historian but never abandoned his commitment to Latter-day Saint doctrine. As a young professor at BYU, he clashed with Boyd Packer after the latter gave a talk, “The Mantle Is Far, Far Greater than the Intellect,” which argued that historians need not tell everything nor explain all events apart from spiritual causes. Quinn countered with an address that argued that historians could acknowledge the influence of environment and circumstance while still affirming the reality of divine revelation. Quinn then detailed Mormonism's antebellum context in his prize-winning Early Mormonism and the one of his many publications that led to with the BYU His also became an after an told the of the history department that Quinn had been at a gay from BYU in but what his excommunication five years later was his chapter Women the published in Women and In this article and his later book among A Mormon Quinn a usable Latter-day Saints were more of women and persons than was the church's modern Quinn wrote that his excommunication like a death in the family, I was at in the his orthodoxy in theology, he never case a in the church's against the scrutiny of their publications and public for in the under the leadership of much of this work was on in by the formed Church by Apostles E. and M. 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