He found me outside and was kind and helpful. By Peggy Fletcher Stack January 16, 2015 SALT LAKE CITY (RNS) John Dehlin, known to support same-sex marriage and the Ordain Women movement, said he expects "either disfellowshipment (i.e . He left quietly and went to call the LDS Church Office Building to ask about this committee. But Packer certainly said similar things before larger audiences. The Quarum of 12 Apostles wanted to ex her, but the Quarum of Public Relations blocked their move. The modern Mormon church has become a fairly top-down organization, but most responsibility for attending to its members still resides in local lay leaders. The same group of local church leaders who participated in Gileadi's excommunication were present at the baptism service. Devout Mormons consider these callings divinely inspired. I know how to avoid people I didnt want to be in contact with, he says. [5], In 1975, following discussions with Scott Kenney and others, she helped found Sunstone, an independent magazine of Mormon studies. In order to have her blessings fully restored, she had to meet with a general authority at church headquarters. Peggy Fletcher Stack, David Noyce 3/23/2022. Mormonism was as much an identity issue for them as it is for me. (He took the surname from actor Anthony Quinn, whom he knew growing up in the Los Angeles barrio.) Peggy Fletcher Stack has been reporting on faith and religion since 1991. Anderson was excommunicated for an article she wrote in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought that described episodes of what she called ecclesiastical abuse of Latter-day Saint intellectuals. He then announced that I was not a member in good standing and could not use my temple recommend. They divorced soon after. . His father was never Mormon: The son of Mexican immigrants, he changed his namethough never legallyfrom Daniel Pea to Donald Quinn, apparently wanting to escape his heritage as well as his poverty. How have the members of your ward treated you? In the quarter-century since her ouster, Anderson consistently has attended weekly services at her Latter-day Saint congregation, the Whittier Ward. On Sunday with similar church disciplinary actions threatening Mormon feminist Kate Kelly and blogger John Dehlin, Anderson discussed her spiritual journey: What triggered the LDS Church's disciplinary action against you? By Peggy Fletcher Stack. Hebrew scholar Avraham Gileadi has been rebaptized into the LDS Church after being excommunicated for apostasy along with five other writers and scholars in September 1993. Boyd Packer, left, and Dallin Oaks, right, Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, wait for the start of the first session of the 181st Semiannual General Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S., on Saturday, Oct. 1, 2011. Paul's mother was great. Just prior to reading Family Kingdom hed seen an anti-Mormon pamphlet called The Book of Mormon Examined, which highlighted hundreds of changes Joseph Smith made to the Mormon scripture in its first few printings. He later got married in the temple, while I sat outside with friends. The second thing that happens is members learn to be afraid of leaders, and leaders learn to be afraid of members. Peggy Fletcher Stack is the religion columnist for the Salt Lake Tribune, and one of the founders of Sunstone. During Quinns college years, BYUs president, Ernest Wilkinson, organized a student spy ring intended to catch out professors with communist leanings. A forum for ex-mormons and others who have been affected by mormonism to get support and share news, commentary, and comedy about the Mormon church. It did not happen overnight, but many LDS leaders seemed to regret the furor and the hurt that surrounded those excommunications. In 2001, a long-standing effort called the Joseph Smith Papers Project received additional funding and became a major draw to those who wished to study the early days of the church. The temple president tried to make it as good an experience as he could for my parents, Paul, Christian and Marina [his bride] and me. During Quinns New Orleans years, the First Presidency put out a statement discouraging Mormons from participating in academic conferences and other independent forums devoted to the discussion of their faith. Until 23 years ago, one could not formally leave the church without being excommunicated. It was already, in the minds of some, a dangerous pursuit, and it had now become a deadly one, marred by fraud and riddled with errors. They can't ex someone with that king of lineage. One Sunday in February of 1993, Michael Quinn was home sick with a fever when his doorbell rang. Mormons devote one sacrament meeting each month to personal testimonies, and Quinn was sure this would be his last opportunity to offer his in church. I did the very best I knew how to do, the thing that I felt was the right thing to do., Donate to the newsroom now. By Peggy Fletcher Stack After an exhausting six-hour disciplinary hearing Sunday, Mormon leaders temporarily suspended Grant H. Palmer's membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In May, my stake president called me in about it. The movie was a live-action adaptation of the Nintendo game Super Mario Bros. While the simpler approach is handled by a bishop and his two counselors, the more elaborate version is run by a stake president, and it involves not only his two counselors but the stakes high council, a group of 12 men. (KUTV) Peggy Fletcher Stack is the religion writer for the The Salt Lake Tribune.It's the best beat on the paper, she said.Stack fell into the job when she was hired in 1991.I have no degree in . In 1989, Dallin H. Oaks, the onetime law professor and BYU president who was now an apostle, had given a talk called Alternate Voices at the churchs semiannual General Conference. During the hiring process, a college dean offered to protect him, Quinn says, from those peoplethe LDS leadersup in Salt Lake., Before he could be hired, though, he had to visit LDS headquarters at 47 East South Temple in downtown Salt Lake and sit for an interview with one of those peoplespecifically, a general authority, one of the 100 or so men who run the church. She said she was really angry at the church, not at me. Wearing a bathrobe, he answered after several rings and found three men in suits and ties on his doorstep. Many religions have strictures that establish who is in and who is out, but the Mormon church draws a brighter line than most. Running almost 100 pages and including nearly 400 footnotes, the essay was the fruit of decades of thought and research. By Peggy Fletcher Stack | Sep. 5, 2019, 1:20 p.m. | Updated: 11:59 p.m. . 1897 - First Presidency member George Q. Cannon used the media attention on the 1895 conviction and two-year imprisonment of famed Irish poet Oscar Wilde as an opportunity to pu I have been taught a vision of a truly cooperative future where men and women are complete equals. By Chris Jorgensen and Peggy Fletcher Stack The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is purging hundreds of Mormon dissidents who church officials say are preoccupied unduly with Armageddon. They didn't say anything. As she entered the building at 47 East South Temple, she happened to pass Boyd K. Packer on his way out. The churchs critics find the timing convenient: By 1890, the U.S. government had threatened to seize LDS property if polygamy wasnt renounced. At the pinnacle of the Mormon hierarchy is the First Presidencythe churchs prophet and his two counselorsand the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. I had a spiritual prompting that summer staying at my cabin that I wasn't to go. How did you find out about the impending disciplinary hearing? Feb 17. [Excommunicated Mormons are not supposed to take communion.] Today, LDS leaders seem more inclined to recognize, said Wotherspoon, now host of the "Mormon Matters" podcast, "that Zion is made up of people of all types. Quinns status in the church remained unchanged. The September Six were six members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) who were excommunicated or disfellowshipped by the church in September 1993, allegedly for publishing scholarly work against or criticizing church doctrine or leadership. The bombings and subsequent murder trial cast a pall over the practice of Mormon history. Dear Reader: When I began this series of essays on leadership, I never anticipated the final installment would chronicle recent events that have triggered the biggest spiritual struggle of my life. The [women's] Relief Society president found a way to involve me as a "permanent substitute" for Relief Society pianist. The suit was settled out of court and a process for voluntary withdrawal was established in 1989.). The institutional churchs position toward its intellectual community has shifted slowly and subtly but in real ways in the past 30 years; it is possible that there is a worry that allowing for her rebaptism would unearth battles the present First Presidency would like to let lie buried and spur a public relitigation of the issue., Secondly, the controversies surrounding Anderson had a great deal to do with feminism in the church and with ecclesiastical dissent, he said. However, I do not see that eternal equality reflected in the contemporary church.". Some, perhaps, simply regretted the bad press. The church reports a worldwide membership of 16 million. On March 23, 2018, Andersons husband, Paul, died of heart failure. The book won an award from the American Historical Association, but it brought Quinn more grief in Utah. A candlelight vigil was held outside the Salt Lake City meetinghouse where it took place. In 1981, Quinn was asked by the colleges chapter of Phi Alpha Theta, a national honor society for history students, to respond to The Mantle Is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect. He did not pull his punches. In 1988 he resigned his position at Brigham Young University, the private college owned and operated by the Mormon church, having decided that his interest in the problem areas of the religions past jeopardized not only his position on the history faculty but his membership in the church itself. Woodruff himself said in his journal that he was acting for the temporal salvation of the church, and the 1890 Manifestoas his official statement is knownwas not immediately taken to be a divine revelation. The president in 2012, when Hanks was readmitted, was Thomas S. Monson. (Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Lavina Fielding Anderson, who was excommunicated in 1993 as part of the so-called September Six, has had her request for rebaptism into the LDS Church rejected by the faith's governing First Presidency after being approved by her local lay leaders. By Peggy Fletcher Stack By David Noyce For the first time in nearly 30 years, the Mormon church has excommunicated one of its top leaders. While LDS leaders can be defensive about media attention, sustained criticism from the outside world seems to have an effect. If he doesnt, I have his phone number and I know where he lives. Maybe, I suggested, he was trying to bring his full self out into the open. The kindness of my ward members has been really important. As a Mormon, he also knew that same-sex attraction was considered unfortunate at bestsomething to be struggled with, and, if possible, overcome. He also criticized Ezra Taft Benson, then a senior apostle, who had made comments similar to Packers. By Peggy Fletcher Stack. In the past, many Mormon officials had a sense, he said, that the church must protect its members from "wolves among them.". All rights reserved. Something similar, if more protracted, took place after September 1993. This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2014, and information in the article may be outdated. Lavina Fielding Anderson may have been excommunicated from the LDS Church for apostasy more than 20 years ago, but don't think for a minute that this Utah writer is now an outsider to her faith. Believers in Denver Snuffer's Remnant movement gather in a Sandy, Utah, home for a fellowship meeting on Aug. 13, 2017, to sing songs and partake of the sacrament. I might have lost my soul, but at least I still have my mind. Not long after that, the bishop met with Anderson and asked her ever so gently if she would like to discuss reinstatement. There, he tried other kinds of writing, thinking maybe hed put Mormon history behind him. It was, Quinn told me, an awful, awful year., When he had recovered enough to write, Quinn finished the sequel to The Mormon Hierarchy and revised Early Mormonism and the Magic Worldview. Grant, a President of the LDS Church and is the granddaughter of United States Senator from Utah Wallace F. Bennett. Before the first court, Whitesides and Anderson alerted friends and the press, and word spread quickly. After reading Peggy Fletcher Stack's article (linked in April's post), I realized that many of us share Lavina's ongoing concerns, including the exclusion of women from institutional authority and the side-stepping of the Heavenly Mother doctrine. Though he maintained a solemn belief in the Mormon gospel and in the sacrament partaken of by the faithful at Sunday services, he stopped attending church altogether. When the men from the stake presidency came to his door in February, Quinn was living three blocks from the Salt Lake Temple and the worldwide headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "Given who I was, there was no place to go but out," Hanks said in 2003, on the 10th anniversary of the excommunications. Bradley and Hanks are friends who trod a lot of common ground, Robertson said. She said hello, but he did not recognize her. Bad marriages had women running to and away from . ``It was like `We're here to support you, Brother Gileadi,' '' he said of the atmosphere at the . Quinn wrote back more harshly this time, listing all the things Hanks had done that troubled him. I accuse that committee, England declared, of undermining our Church.. Lavina Fielding Anderson, one of the famed September Six writers and scholars disciplined by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1993, got a big no last week to her request for rebaptism from the men who matter most: the faiths governing First Presidency. Quinn got hate mail. The Salt Lake Tribune . Now I see that he just didn't appreciate the dishonesty associated with his grandpa. Then he made copies of his letter and Hanks letter and dropped them off at the offices of Vern Anderson and Peggy Fletcher Stack, a former Sunstone editor who had become a religion reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune. I love John and I support him, but I have never made any claim against truth claims of the church. When Benson asked why no one had stopped him, Oaks allegedly replied, You cant stage manage a grizzly bear. Benson resigned his Mormon membership shortly afterward and became a vocal opponent of the church his grandfather ostensibly led. The noisy nonsense on-screen felt to Quinn like a rough equivalent of what the church was doing to him. Following the wave of media attention that greeted the September excommunications, the First Presidency defended what had taken place. In a detailed confession, Hofmann said that he had secretly stopped believing in Mormonism as a teenager and had hatched a plan to embarrass the church by creating fake documents that exposed uncomfortable facts about early Mormon history. Hi, Peggy. . "All they asked me about was my relationship to Jesus Christ. The handbook doesn't say you can't speak in class, just over the pulpit. Quinn went over local church rolls and found addresses of kids who didnt come to Sunday services. If there is unfinished business, its the First Presidencys, not mine.. That higher-ranking leader, James Paramore, had further instructed West to say that the decision was Wests own, and had not come from above. By then, Quinn had more or less moved on. (Quinn is known professionally as D. Michael Quinn; the first name on his birth certificate is Dennis.) [Husband] Paul, Christian [their son] and I sang in the choir that day. At the time, he was grieving the death of his son, who had gone missing and was found weeks later hanging from a tree by an extension cord. Quinns polygamy essay, meanwhile, produced more trouble for him with LDS leaders. He contends that a former director of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir had openly romantic feelings for men, and highlights a once hushed-up gay affair from the 1940s between a prominent church leader and a 21-year-old Mormon serving in the Navy. With his background in education, he became interested in how the church taught its own past, and decided he did not like what was going on at the church historians office. [5] She met Mike Stack when he volunteered as a photographer for Sunstone in 1984, and they married in October 1985. The all-male priesthood leaders in his Willow Creek Sandy LDS stake could have excommunicated the 64-year-old author, but chose instead a . By Peggy Fletcher Stack The Salt Lake Tribune. But by the fall of 92 he had to return to Salt Lake City to finish research on the book, and he had grown tired of hiding from church authorities. She talks very vaguely when it comes to personal, specific spiritual beliefs and whether they align with doctrine, but she doesn't hesitate to call the church out on its shit at all. Stack has been the lead religion writer for The Salt Lake Tribune since 1991. She did, however, tell her leaders her concerns about church exclusion policies: barring worthy LGBTQ couples who are legally married from full participation; blocking worthy and righteous women from the male-only priesthood; and keeping Mother in Heaven from her place in our understanding.. We had been home about 20 minutes when two high counselors came to our house and delivered a letter, inviting me to a disciplinary hearing two weeks from that day. Looking back, it was a real blessing. Her explorations gave Hanks a new level of understanding and "testimony" of Mormonism. Local TV reporters were filming the session, and the AP reporter Vern Anderson was sitting at the far side of the room about halfway back. ", Hanks is a "genuinely spiritual person and quite insightful, who brings a type of spirituality with her that will resonate with lots of people," he said. Caffeinated Version: I used to think Steve Benson was a bad person. 1) I am very proud that, unlike the LDS Church, I have been transparent regarding OSF finances and my own compensation. Peggy Fletcher Stack / Salt Lake Tribune: High-ranking Mormon official, who twice spoke in General Conference, is excommunicated Check out Mini-memeorandum for simple mobiles or memeorandum Mobile for modern smartphones. Two of the so-called "September Six" have found their way back into the LDS fold while Anderson though never rebaptized in some ways has never left. Peggy Fletcher Stack is an American journalist, editor, and author. SALT LAKE CITY (RNS) After years of tension between Mormons and gay rights activists -- with political action and theological pronouncements on one . West said hed been told by a higher authority to take further action to remedy the situation, Quinn says. We had a family devotional every night with prayer, singing and scripture reading. Supposedly Nelson, like Benson, was a supporter of the John Birch Society, a radically right-wing, conspiracy-mongering, anti-Communist group. For the faithful, the simplest narrative regarding LDS polygamy is that God wanted Mormons to practice it between 1843when He revealed the doctrine of plural marriage to Joseph Smithand 1890, when He informed one of Smiths successors, Wilford Woodruff, of a change in course. By: Peggy Fletcher Stack. He didn't seem to know what footnotes are so he thought I made the whole thing up. But 90 percent of the ward has changed since my court. Hanks was accused of apostasy for editing an anthology, Women and Authority: Re-Emerging Mormon Feminism, which included a discussion of the all-male priesthood and womens relationship to it. He was the first academic to occupy the post, previously held only by high-ranking LDS leaders, and his appointment signaled a broader effort to reorganize the historians office along professional lines. The book opened Quinns teenage eyes to dissent within the highest echelons of LDS leadership, and to the apostles debateand apparent dissemblingabout plural marriage after 1890. The former LDS stake president, who oversaw a group of Mormon congregations in Tooele for eight years and worked as an architect on her faith's most sacred spaces, faced, in her mind, an impossible choice: Either return to living as a man or resign her . Some things that are true are not very useful. Its not clear whether Packer read Quinns work before interviewing him, but if he did, it probably would have struck him as less than useful. The meaning of EXCOMMUNICATION is an ecclesiastical censure depriving a person of the rights of church membership. Though the letter from the current First Presidency made up of church President Russell M. Nelson and counselors Dallin H. Oaks and Henry B. Eyring offered no explanation for the rejection, Bowman speculates that there may be at least two possible answers history and dissent. There are important aspects of Mormon life, such as temple ceremonies, that are open only to the truly faithful. The same month that his essay about post-Manifesto polygamy was published, in April 1985, Quinn and his wife separated. Saturday, February 22, 1997. He loves cities, and when he lived in New Orleans in the early 90s, he made friends in bars and in an informal group of gay professionals who gathered once a month. Sometimes Stack refers to Salt Lake City . He referred to the pathos that I felt in your private letters to mea plea to not be discarded from something that you love. I want to help resolve that pathos, he added, and a sadness that seems to pervade your private writing to me.. If her reentry had been approved, Anderson would have been the third of the six the other five are Avraham Gileadi, Lynne Kanavel Whitesides, D. Michael Quinn, Paul Toscano and Maxine Hanks to be welcomed back into full fellowship with the Utah-based faith. Quinn is no longer actively seeking an academic job. He had, after all, believed for many years that he would someday be a leader of the church, knowing that if this were true he would have to forever suppress an essential part of himself. Stack has been the lead religion writer for The Salt Lake Tribune since 1991. . Where else would I be but in the church? At Yale, while serving as one of two counselors to the local bishop, he found unanswered letters in the wards files from people who wished to leave the church. Her sincere belief in Jesus and determination to follow him no matter the adversity faced within or without the church should be commended, and this good and faithful servant should be rewarded, he wrote. He acknowledged to me that, of course, it is possible to find outlets for service outside of Mormonism. After organizing a massive campaign to pass Proposition 8 and make gay marriage illegal in California, for instance, the church suffered a massive backlash and has since appeared more tolerant toward gay rights activism. It's a way for me to participate and contribute, almost like having a calling. I attended the Sunstone Symposium this past summer, held on the University of Utah campus, and many people I spoke to there said that as Packers influence has waned, a more tolerant approach to dissent is taking hold. In 1975, partly at Packers urging, Leonard Arringtons role at the church historians office was greatly diminished. During Sunday school, a man approached him and said, The bishop would like to talk to you. Quinn dreaded what was coming.
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