Signature Books: A Little Something for Everyone (Student Review)
Books for Mormons: Some Thoughtful Stuff Is Coming off the Presses (This People)
A Mormon Renaissance (Illinois Historical Journal)
Publisher Adds Controversy to the Pages of Mormon History (Associated Press)
Mormon History Has Its Quirks (Detroit Free Press)
Latter-day Skeptics: Liberal Yet Loyal Mormon Scholars (Christianity Today)
The Lost World of Mormonism (New York Review of Books)
Recent Mormon Fiction (Utah Humanities Council Newsletter)
The Year in Review (Association for Mormon Letters)
In Religion Studies, Universities Bend to Views of Faithful (Wall Street Journal)

"SIGNATURE BOOKS: A LITTLE SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE"
STUDENT REVIEW, BRYAN WATERMAN
Driving over the railroad tracks on Salt Lake's west side has traditionally brought you to a seedier part of town; your friends roll up their windows and start talking about drive-by shootings, and if you're far enough south, close to Pioneer Park and the Rio Grande train station, you see the undeniable evidence of Salt Lake's homeless problem. But one neighborhood a little to the north is swimming against that current, swimming hard. In one of the oldest neighborhoods in the Salt Lake valley, in one of the three oldest SLC houses still standing, a sometimes renegade Mormon publishing company recently relocated and set up shop.

Signature Books, now in its thirteenth year of publishing, inhabits the pioneer home of Nelson Whipple, a polygamist and superintendent of Salt Lake's first public bathhouse. His home, a two-story stuccoed adobe bordered with pioneer lilac bushes, was completed in 1854, is on the National Register of Historic Places, and is the perfect place for Signature. Whipple, although he had only a few weeks of formal education, loved to read and kept a detailed set of diaries. Providing good reading (often of pioneer diaries) is what Signature does best. Also, Whipple didn't always receive the best treatment from his would-be pious neighbor Saints; in his journal he records a time when, suffering from hunger, he asked one of Heber C. Kimball's wives for scraps of food she was throwing out; she refused. Other neighbors were equally "cold as cucumbers," he writes.

In over a decade of publishing, Signature has sometimes received similar treatment. In a letter from a local man asking that his name be removed from their mailing list, Signature was accused of being "Mephistopheles' straw man," and "Korihor Press," a label originally applied to the publishing firm by a BYU religion professor in a book review. (The incident sparked rumors of a lawsuit; according to Signature staff their attorney merely asked for an apology.) Recently, another BYU professor sent out an e-mail message suggesting that the folks at Signature can sometimes be seen sporting leather on the Salt Lake underground, and yet another sent a message, asking hopefully if anyone knew whether a Signature author had been fired from his job at WordPerfect.

Why the antagonism? Ron Priddis, a BYU graduate who has worked as Signature's publicist since 1985, says many people misunderstand Signature and its purpose. "They see us as having a narrow publishing agenda, when in reality we're sensitive to quite a broad audience," Priddis told me. "We have different markets for different kinds of books—our trade books might not do so well at Deseret Books outlets, but the titles that do sell well at Deseret don't always sell at the trade book stores."

Signature's wide variety still reflects a purpose that runs slightly against (or complementary to) mainstream Mormon publishing. According to director of publishing Gary Bergera, the press was founded in 1981 in direct response to a series of crises in Mormon publishing: the removal of Leonard Arrington's Church History Division to BYU; increased restriction placed on access to LDS church archives; and, most of all, the cancellation of Arrington's main project as Church Historian—a sixteen volume history of the Church. Signature's founders wanted to create a press which would take on the project and publish the volumes as individual books. Although a number of them have subsequently been published by firms across the country, Signature only ended up publishing one, Eugene Campbell's Establishing Zion, a history of the Church's movement to and settlement of the Great Basin.

Even if Signature didn't end up printing the sesquicentennial history, it has made incredible contributions to the work of publishing Mormon history. The early-80s saw the publication of a nine-volume set of Wilford Woodruff's Journals, and since then Signature has carried on the tradition of printing high-quality, limited edition transcriptions of Mormon pioneer diaries and journals, including those of Senator Reed Smoot. Bergera and Priddis, who took their position at Signature after having founded the short-lived but dynamic Seventh East Press (an independent student paper that set the stage for the Student Review) were working together at the time on their fun-filled history, Brigham Young University: A House of Faith, a must-read companion volume to more censored accounts of BYU's past. Since their arrival, they have continued to push Signature in new directions and to new levels of success; according to Priddis and sales rep Boyd Payne, Signature's figures in November 1993 were twice those of November 1992.

Indeed, the criticism from conservative quarters seems blind to the diversity of Signature' titles. Of those currently in print, some half a dozen or so are written by BYU professors, ranging from English professor John Bennion's collection of short stories, Breeding Leah, to newly-hired history professor Steven Epperson's award-winning dissertation, Mormons and Jews, to Eugene England's anthologies of LDS fiction and poetry, to Thomas Alexander's biography of Wilford Woodruff, also award-winning, having earned the Mormon History Association's 1992 award for Best Book in Mormon History.

Recently, Salt Lake Tribune "Utah Under Cover" reviewer Paul Swenson included three Signature titles—also representing a diversity—on his list of the best ten books he reviewed in 1993: Maxine Hanks' controversial landmark Women and Authority: Re-emerging Mormon Feminism placed second; England's Bright Angels and Familiars and Shayne Bell's anthology of sci-fi, Washed by a Wave of Wind also made the list. Swenson's list included titles by Random House, MIT Press, and University of Utah Press, putting Signature Books in good company.

Bergera does not see Signature's raison d'etre, though, as a natural source of some of the opposition the press has received; Signature exists, in Bergera's words, "to publish scholarly works on Mormon history, arts and letters which would not find an outlet with established LDS-oriented publishers." The literature they publish, including Levi Peterson stories and his novel The Backslider (arguably Mormonism's premiere piece of fiction to date) sometimes doesn't settle well with the Jack Weyland audience.

Signature's history titles often contain material the Church correlates out of its current curriculum (the post-Manifesto polygamy outlined in Richard Van Wagoner's Mormon Polygamy: A History, for example). Signature also had published titles by non-LDS authors whose conclusion questions basic LDS faith-claims, such as Lutheran minister Robert Hullinger's Joseph Smith's Response to Skepticism. Hullinger's book, although quite sympathetic to Joseph Smith, approaches The Book of Mormon as the work of Joseph Smith's imagination, and attempts to explain why he would have written it (he concluded that Joseph wanted it to be just what the title page says it is: another testament of Jesus Christ, to convince an increasingly skeptical world of his divinity).

Most unsettling to ultra-orthodox audiences (especially the F.A.R.M.S. crowd, Signature's chief critics), though, are titles by LDS authors who take non-traditional approaches to scripture. The Word of God, a collection of essays on Mormon scripture, includes works that seek to apply modern textual criticism to LDS standard works. Last year Signature published Brent Metcalfe's New Approaches to the Book of Mormon, a collection of articles from contemporary critical perspectives. While many of the authors see The Book of Mormon as a nineteenth century product, they still accept it as scripture; that's not good enough for F.A.R.M.S., though, which is dedicated to affirming the Book of Mormon's historicity. This month F.A.R.M.S. will release a sizeable collection of criticism of Metcalfe's book. The dialogue, if it can successfully shy away form name calling and ad hominem attacks, could prove to be one of Mormonism's most engaging and profitable.

Still, as the title of this piece suggests, Signature has a little something for everyone's tastes. If you're into humor, they have provided an entire series of cartoon books by Ogden Standard Examiner cartoonist Cal Grondahl, including his latest, Utah Sex and Travel Guide. Leisure lovers will enjoy a recently published guide to historic Salt Lake neighborhoods. If you're a history buff, you might be waiting on the edge of your seat for Richard Van Wagoner's forthcoming biography of Sidney Rigdon. And if contemporary Mormon culture interests you, watch for Black Saints in a White Church, a look at the experiences of contemporary African-American Latter-day Saints by Jessie L. Embry of BYU"s Charles Redd Center for Western Studies; her book is due out in a few months. After close to fifteen years, Signature has already left an invaluable legacy for the field of Mormon Studies. According to Priddis and Bergera, the future only holds more of the same.

"BOOKS FOR MORMONS: SOME THOUGHTFUL STUFF IS COMING OFF THE PRESSES"
THIS PEOPLE, EUGENE ENGLAND
Those who read my column know I am fairly critical of "popular" Mormon fiction, the generally naive and sentimental ("happy people with happy problems") fare read by about ten times as many people as "serious" Mormon fiction of Peterson and Thayer and Sillitoe, etc. So I was prepared to be disappointed in Gerald Lund's Pillar of Light (Bookcraft, $14.95), the first in a projected multi-volume saga, The Work and The Glory, the story of a fictional family from the time they join the Mormons in Palmyra in 1830 down to the present.

But I was happily surprised at how much I enjoyed reading this long novel, how much I came to care about the Steed family, and how much I look forward to the next volume. Lund is certainly not a great stylist, and there are both minor flaws (such as too much explanation of details of culture and local belief and practices forced into the book) and major ones. . .

But despite the flaws, the book is gripping and moving, because it is grounded in real, dramatic, and terribly important events, and Lund succeeds in giving those almost mythic events for Mormons a human face. He takes us inside the minds and feelings of people as they believe or refuse to believe that God has "the long, long silence broke," has come to earth, spoken salvation to mortals, and given us a second, confirming, tangible witness and guide to Christ, the Book of Mormon.

Bookcraft, especially with its series of volumes published with BYU's Religious Studies Center, is trying to make a serious scholarly contribution to Mormon letters (as does Deseret Book with its Nibley series in cooperation with FARMS).

The press that is making the most sustained contribution to serious Mormon letters right now is of course, Signature Books. Not only do they publish much of the best Mormon fiction and most collections of essays, but they continue admirably to recover Mormon classics. The Essential Parley P. Pratt ($17.95) is the first in a new "Classics in Mormon Thought Series." As the excellent foreword by Peter L. Crowley (professor of mathematics at BYU and perhaps the foremost student of early Mormon books) points out, Pratt "all but single-handedly invented Mormon book writing."

Pratt published the first book of Mormon poetry, The Millennium, a Poem, To Which is Added Hymns and Songs (1835); the first Mormon fiction, A Dialogue Between Joe Smith and the Devil (1844); the first and most important of non-canonical Mormon books of theology, The Voice of Warning (1837); the first Mormon book published outside of North America or Europe, the first published account of Joseph Smith's 1820 vision, etc. etc.

Though Pratt's Key to the Science of Theology (1855) is the first attempt at a comprehensive and synthetical description of Mormon beliefs, he is not remembered as a theologian in company with Roberts, Talmage, or even his brother Orson. This may be partly because, as Crawley reminds us, "Mormonism is all but creedless," and few distinctive doctrines are defined in "official" sources, so Mormon theology "exists primarily in the minds of the members" and "each generation must produce a new set of gospel expositors to restate and reinterpret the doctrines," which seems to occur about every thirty years. But Parley died two years after publishing that first Mormon theology, and Crawley conjectures that Orson's long life and strong reputation and the stopping of Mormon publishing for twenty-five years during the polygamy problems, perhaps together with the Saints' preference for his "more direct, unambiguous" style, made Orson Pratt's Works more popular. Its style then became standard for the more popular synthesizers in each succeeding generation, such as Talmage and Joseph Fielding Smith.

But Crowley insists that the spirit and approach of Parley's writing is "more faithful to the informal, idiosyncratic nature of Mormon theology." I agree, and I worry (along with many others) that the Encyclopedia of Mormonism (to be published next fall by Macmillan) will tend to give privileged status to the more formal, even creedal, kind of theology Orson began. If so, it will further diminish, to our harm, the more personal, dramatic, exalting, paradoxical, narrative examination of our Mormon ideas and experience that Parley gave voice to—and which may be much more true to our continuously revealed religions.

The main synthesizer of Mormon theology in the next generation after Parley—writing more in Parley's tradition than Orson's—was B. H. Roberts. Signature has now published the first edition of his remarkable Autobiography (paper, $12.95), edited by Gary James Bergera and with an informative, stimulating, and laudatory Foreword by Sterling M. McMurrin. There are serious stylistic problems with the narrative in the early chapters. (It was written originally mainly in third person, passive voice, "probably in an attempt to avoid self-aggrandizement," and edited to first person by Bergera, but retains the terribly distracting passive constructions and dangling modifiers "While cutting the bacon, the knife slipped and dropped into the turbid water of the La Plate and was never found, and the treasure which had been bought for my mother, who was remembered to be seamstress," etc.)

Nevertheless, this book is a treasure, composed of generally lively, detailed, and thoughtful accounts of a desperate childhood, rowdy teen-age years, self-education into perhaps Mormondom's brightest intellectual light, heroic adventures as mission president in the South, anguished struggle with conscience and near loss of his position as a General Authority over his political decisions, all capped by a courageous and exemplary effort to maintain his integrity and contributions as a liberal writer of theology and history while serving in a conservative hierarchy.

A MORMON RENAISSANCE
ILLINOIS HISTORICAL JOURNAL, KENT WALGREN
Marvin S. Hill's Quest for Refuge is two books. Hill presents not only the evidence for his thesis that the development of early Mormonism can best be understood as a reaction against pluralism, but also he provides an up-to-date, scholarly history of Mormonism through the death of Joseph Smith.

It has been said that the Italian Renaissance arrived with Marsilio Ficino's translationof the Corpus Hermeticum for Cosimo dé Medici in 1463. A part of the Corpus, the Asclepius, provided the text of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man, published in 1487: "And so, O Asclepius, man is a magnum miraculum, a being worthy of reverence and honor. For he goes into the nature of a god as though he were himself a god."

That theme, the ennoblement of man, reverberated down through the Renaissance and into the Enlightenment, affording man previously unknown powers to fashion his own reality. According to Hill (quoting sociologist Peter L. Berger), "Such choices did not exist in the medieval world, where the social order was set and sustained a unified, religious world view" (page 14). When the Enlightenment reached America in the late eighteenth century, the decline of the established order left confusion and individual insecurity.

Hill, a professor of American history at Brigham Young University, defines anti-pluralism as "the deep Mormon aversion to religious institutional diversity" (page ix). What he is getting at is the universal human insecurity that comes from too many choices, described by Erich Fromm in Escape from Freedom. In the burned-over district of western New York in the early nineteenth century, that fear—compounded by poverty and lack of education—produced a populace with a peculiarly strong attraction to the early Mormon concept of Kingdom, a secure and "all inclusive community with social, economic, religious, and political freedom resulting from the American Revolution, but he suggests that the Mormons "may have comprised the denomination upon which this reaction has had its most power[ful] influence" (page xxii).

Hill's most controversial conclusion is that Mormon anti-pluralism was the main cause of Mormon persecution in Ohio, Missouri, and Illionois. Initially, I had reservations; but after considering his evidence, I believe that he may be right.

In the excellent (though brief) overview of early Mormon history, Hill concentrates on primary sources, and his conclusions are generally sound. It is refreshing that a Mormon historian acknowledges such problems as the unlikeliness of the Palmyra revival of 1820, the 1826 trial of Joseph Smith for money digging, the pecuniary importance to the Smith family of the publication of the Book of Mormon, and the probable influence of Thomas Dick's Philosophy of a Future State on the early development of Mormon cosmology. What is disheartening is that Quest for Refuge, because of its forthrightness, could not have been published by Brigham Young University Press, an indication that a vestige of internal anti-pluralism lingers on in Mormon institutions.

The scarcity of publishing outlets for serious works on Mormon history and culture has been eased since 1981 by Signature Books, a small publisher fueled more by love than by money. Signature issues not only carefully selected and well-edited works but also fine physical books as well. It is just possible that future chroniclers of Mormon historiography may look back on the Signature Books era as a kind of renaissance of its own.

"PUBLISHER ADDS CONTROVERSY TO THE PAGES OF MORMON HISTORY"
ASSOCIATED PRESS, VERN ANDERSON
To his critics, George D. Smith is a shadowy figure bent on reshaping Mormonism by digging through its past. To colleagues, he's a shy man of principle in pursuit of truth. So who is George Smith really?

As president of Signature Books, an independent publisher of Mormon-related history and literature, Smith says he is committed to unfettered historical inquiry. "Whatever a historian overturns, if it's an actual document of a contemporary statement back in the 1800s that reveals something that's important, we will not shy away from publishing it if the author has done responsible historical research," he said. "I'm willing to shake the tree and perhaps others don't like to shake the tree because it's sacred."

That sentiment makes Smith the darling of like-minded scholars, but the scourge of Mormon traditionalists whose mandate is to write "faithful history" defined by Apostle Boyd K. Packer, a decade ago as history that bolsters belief and avoided awkward or embarrassing details. Such polar views almost ensured that Salt Lake-based Signature Books would celebrate its 10th anniversary in the familiar shade of controversy.

Deseret Book, the publishing house and bookstore chain owned by the Mormon Church, this month pulled two of Signature's titles from its shelves. One of them, Joseph Smith's New York Reputation Reexamined, by Rodger Anderson, had been named the Mormon History Association's best first book. The other was The Word of God: Essays on Mormon Scripture.

At the same time, the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies at Brigham Young University issued a "correction or clarification: after one of its reviews called certain Word of God contributors "dishonest" and "hard-core anti-Latter-day Saints." The foundation said the statements were the reviewer's interpretation and not its own, and that no personal attack was intended.

Smith, 52, a life-long member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, sees the sniping as "sort of silly" and says it comes from an unwillingness to consider alternative viewpoints. "What is relevant is the marketplace of ideas," Smith said from his Smith Capital Management office in San Francisco. "I don't admit to being anti-anything except anti-anybody that limits the interchange of ideas."

Smith is reluctant to discuss his own background and personal views. Raised in New York and Los Angeles, Smith became enthralled with Mormon history while reading the multi-volume History of the Church by its founding prophet, Joseph Smith. An MBA degree from New York University and later work with Citibank did nothing to curb his interest.

Signature's founding in 1981 grew out of the church's decision to cancel a planned 16-volume history of the faith and to muzzle its own historical department. Smith jumped at the chance to publish some of the rejected work.

Signature has never turned a profit, but the company is verging on the black as its number of titles in the highly competitive but narrow field of Mormon letters has grown. [Photo caption—George D. Smith, president and co-founder of Salt Lake City-based Signature Books, which publishes Mormon-related books, holds a copy of the journals of William Clayton. Smith is in his San Francisco office. Clayton was the personal secretary of Joseph Smith.]

"MORMON HISTORY HAS ITS QUIRKS"
DETROIT FREE PRESS, DAVID CRUMM
Question: Where can you read true stories about such unusual topics as polygamy, God's wife, and dangerous dealings in mysterious historical artifacts that sound like chapters out of the "Indiana Jones" series? Answer: From a small, independent Mormon publishing house called Signature Books.

Signature has capitalized on the growth of the main Mormon denomination, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which has grown from 2.8 million members in 1970 to 4 million last year to rank as the sixth largest Christian denomination in the United States. The church today is famous for sending young missionaries around the world and for emphasizing wholesome family life in nation-wide TV commercials—but Mormons also have carved out some of the strangest chapters in American history.

The Latter-Day Saints are the only denomination in American history to be invaded by the U.S. Army. In 1857, the short-lived Utah War was touched off by tensions between President James Buchanan and church leaders over their practice of polygamy and the independent Mormon form of government.

Signature was founded eight years ago by two Mormon intellectuals who wanted to publish histories, essays and other books about such subjects—topics that many Mormon leaders would just as soon forget. "Some people in the church say we shouldn't talk about things that don't promote the faith, but others say: 'Thank goodness that someone is providing an avenue where these things can be discussed,'" says George Smith who helped found Signature and is now its president.

There's also a wealth of fascinating stories for non-Mormons among the 45 books Signature has published over the years. Consider a few recent titles:

Mormon Polygamy: A History, by Richard Van Wagoner ($12.95) is a rare glimpse at the way Mormons secretly built up their system of multiple marriages and the often disastrous results before the church banned the practice in 1890.

Quest For Refuge: The Mormon Flight From American Pluralism by Marvin Hill ($19.95) is the story of Joseph Smith's founding of the church in the 1830s in New York and the Midwest as a communal utopia that tried to separate itself from the rest of the county.

Line Upon Line: Essays on Mormon Doctrine, edited by Gary Bergera ($9.95), explores in down-to-earth language many intriguing ideas, including the traditional Mormon belief that there is a Mother-God in Heaven who is a partner of the Father God.

Salamander, by Linda Sillitoe and Allen Roberts, ($17.95) hardcover, $5.95 paperback) was one of several books written about Mark Hofmann, the forger who built up a small fortune by inventing potentially embarrassing documents about early Mormon history and selling them to church officials. He later pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in a series of bombings related to his plot. The book was released last year in hardback and will be released in paperback in November.

"Mormonism is a young religion and it still suffers in some ways from insecurity, paranoia and sometimes from a siege mentality," says Bergera, who is the publisher for Signature and considers himself a committed Mormon. "It's embarrassing for some people in the church to talk about such things as polygamy....Next year is the 100th anniversary of the church manifesto that outlawed polygamy within the Mormon church, but I don't think there will be any celebrations."

Next year, Signature plans to publish a book that will be even more controversial because it calls into question the validity of a major book in Mormon scriptures. In addition to the Bible, Mormon scripture also embraces the Book of Mormon, which Joseph Smith said was revealed to him by an angel, as well as a collection of other documents and historical books, including the Book of Abraham.

In 1835, Smith bought a collection of Egyptian papyri that he later declared contained the lost Book of Abraham, written personally by the ancient patriarch while he was in Egypt. Smith also claimed that God had given him a miraculous power to translate the hieroglyphics into English.

The upcoming Signature book will argue that modern Egyptologists find no relationship at all between the papyri and the Book of Abraham. However, the Mormon magazine, the Ensign, has already defended the authenticity of the Book of Abraham by publishing a list of possible responses.

The problem may be troubling for many Mormons, but confronting the matter ultimately will strengthen the church, says Bergera. "Ignoring the difficult questions just won't work in the long term. It may have some short term benefits, but it's not a solution by any means."

"LATTER-DAY SKEPTICS: LIBERAL YET LOYAL MORMON SCHOLARS ARE BRINGING LONG-KEPT SECRETS ABOUT JOSEPH SMITH INTO THE OPEN"
CHRISTIANITY TODAY, CHARLES CARPENTER
John Kunich is a graduate of Harvard Law School. He also holds degrees in biological science from the University of Illinois. Last year he authored a study examining the population sizes shown in the Book of Mormon. The article presents compelling evidence that tales of a long-lost North American civilization of the size described in the Latter-day Saints' sacred book simply cannot be based on fact.

Richard Van Wagoner has written a book examining the history of polygamy in the Mormon church. His research details how founder Joseph Smith routinely lied to hide is involvement in plural marriage. Van Wagoner cites evidence that Smith branded the practice a "false and corrupt doctrine" at a time when he was engaged in it.

Joseph Smith's Dirty Laundry.
Critical voices are nothing new to the Mormon church. Most Christian book stores contain scores of titles that describe the difficult aspects of the faith of the Latter-day Saints. The writing of the two men cited above, however, will not be found in these stores. John Kunich and Richard Van Wagoner are both active, believing members of the Mormon church. Additionally, their works are published by Mormons and are aimed at a Mormon readership. They are representative of a growing segment of liberal believers within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS).

Unlike most of their fellow members, these individuals wrestle with the intellectual difficulties they see in their faith. And at a time when church leaders increasingly promote Mormonism as a viable mainstream denomination, these scholars and researchers are demonstrating that the church's history and scripture are fraught with difficulty. They are writing the so-called New Mormon History.

Signature Books is a publishing house based in Salt Lake City, Utah. The company is owned by a Mormon, and most Signature books deal with topics relevant to LDS culture and theology. Some of their titles explore controversial issues, like Van Wagoner's Mormon Polygamy: A History.

Though polygamy is one of the more colorful elements of early Mormonism, it is a topic that rarely receives official attention. Van Wagoner takes a close look at Mormon plural marriage from its inception with Joseph Smith to its contemporary practice among LDS splinter groups. He reveals Smith as a man who led two very different lives—one in the open, the other in secret.

In public, Smith preached monogamy as the God-ordained pattern for marriage. In 1835 the church placed into its canon of scripture a section that proclaimed, "All legal contracts of marriage made before a person is baptized into this church, should be held sacred and fulfilled. Inasmuch as this church of Christ has been reproached with the crime of fornication, and polygamy, we declare that we believe, that one man should have one wife; and one woman, but one husband" (Book of Commandments, 1835 edition).

Smith's public position is extremely problematic, however, because 1835 is, according to Van Wagoner, the same year he likely began his foray into polygamy. And despite Smith's canonized edict shown above, Van Wagoner notes that he did not limit his affections to single women. "He sought to marry wives of several living men, refusing to recognize their civil marriage." Smith's duplicity appears yet more pronounced when it is shown that the revelation he claimed to have received from God sanctioning polygamy is dated July 12, 1843—long after he began the practice.

When Smith was killed in 1844, he left behind at least 27 widows. He also left a body of teaching declaring polygamy to be a false and corrupt practice. Church leaders concealed his revelation condoning polygamy until 1852.

Rocking the Boat Rockers.
In the tranquil seas of Mormon life, the liberals stand out as a most peculiar group. Uniformity is the Mormon way. Their chapels all look alike; their missionaries dress alike; and church leaders encourage members to think alike. In departing from this traditional mold, some liberals are finding themselves at odds with church leaders.

In April of 1989, during the church's semiannual general conference, Apostle Dallin Oaks referred to liberals as "alternative voices" within the church. Oaks conceded that a few may operate with good intentions, but he accused others of being motivated by selfishness and pride. The Mormon apostle labeled some as "lost souls who cannot hear the voice of the Shepherd and trot about trying to find their way without his guidance."

Mormon church spokesman Donald LeFevre insists there is room in the church for the liberals. Speaking from LDS headquarters in Salt Lake City LeFevre explained to CT, "We have members of our church clear across the spectrum: from total believers, to middle of the road, to inactive, to nonbelievers. Is there a place for them in the church? Of course there is." Nevertheless, some are having a hard time finding that place.

In 1986, D. Michael Quinn, a highly respected Mormon scholar, was voted Outstanding Teacher by students at church-owned Brigham Young University, where he served as professor of American history. In 1987, however, Quinn's relationship with the church took a bad turn when Signature published his book, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View. Quinn had already expressed criticism of the church's insistence that LDS historians confine their writings to "so-called 'faith-promoting' Church history which conceals controversies and difficulties of the Mormon past."

In his book, Quinn concludes, "Joseph Smith evidently participated extensively in magical pursuits, and he shared with others of his contemporaries a magic world view of the world." Evidence linking Smith to occult practices had surfaced previously. In 1971 documents were discovered relating to an 1826 trial in Bainbridge, New York, where Smith had been convicted of glass-looking, a form of divination. Hugh Nibley, one of the church's most prolific apologists, denied the charge and claimed that if a connection could be established between Smith and such an occult practice, it would be "the most damning evidence in existence against Joseph Smith."

Now we have Quinn's book, the most comprehensive and thoroughly researched work linking Joseph Smith to the practice of magic. Remember Quinn is a Mormon. Ron Priddis, vice-president of Signature Books, detailed the church's reaction to Quinn's work. "He was basically given the choice at BYU of either resigning or being fired." According to Priddis, Quinn chose to resign. To date, neither Quinn nor the church has issued any statement about the incident.

Like most LDS historians, Valeen Tippetts Avery, professor of history at Norther Arizona University, did not set out to write a controversial book. But, as she notes, "You can't write a biography about a married woman without talking about her husband." The biography she co-wrote with Linda King Newell is titled Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith. Emma Smith was the first of Joseph Smith's wives.

"When you look at it from his wife's point of view," Avery explains, "he is the creator of problems in her life. And he creates them by doing things which are manifestly unacceptable in the Mormon church today; manipulating his friends, lying to his wife, being caught in flagrante delicto with servant girls, and so on." Contrary to official portrayals, Mormon Enigma depicts Emma Smith as staunchly opposed to her husband's polygamous pursuits.

Although the book received two prestigious awards from Mormon historical associations, its reception among many church leaders and members was icy. Shortly after the book was published, church authorities issued a ban prohibiting Newell and Avery from speaking of the book during church meetings. The reaction among church members was even more pointed. According to Avery, the response ranged from the sincere—believing Mormons who urged her to repent—to the violent. "I have had the police around my office to protect me from bombers," says Avery.

Mettlesome Pens.
Despite such opposition, the liberals continue to be mettlesome, confidently displaying the results of their research. This newfound boldness is evident in the demeanor of John Kunich. An air force attorney stationed in Washington D.C., Kunich joined the Mormon church 12 years ago at the age of 25. Since his conversion, Kunich has been very active in church callings. He does, however, recognize that he is not like most of his fellow members. "I do hold some heretical beliefs," he says with a laugh. "I usually keep my mouth shut in church meetings because you don't want to be known as a freethinker in church." But Kunich is a freethinker, and he has uncovered evidence that casts doubt on the veracity of the Book of Mormon.

The Book of Mormon claims to be the story of a small group of Jews who migrated from Jerusalem to the New World long before the birth of Christ. It indicates that this group, about 30 in number, grew to become a huge civilization that splintered into warring factions. According to the book's narrative, these wars resulted in millions of deaths.

"From my biological background I knew that something was wrong in what I was reading there," says Kunich. "I did some research into human population growth over history and found that none of the rate reported could have produced the results in the Book of Mormon." The book simply has too many people living and dying. Kunich discovered the rate of growth shown in the text is 50 times that found in any civilization that existed prior to the twentieth century. He has a difficult time imagining the book to be an accurate historical account.

Kunich believes he is far from alone in his unorthodox beliefs. "I think there are a lot of people who have reached similar conclusions for different reasons . . .They pretty much keep quiet in meetings so that they can remain part of the community and not have to explain themselves."

While silence in church may be safest for those closet doubters, there are avenues of expression available. Kunich's study on the Book of Mormon population sizes was published in Sunstone magazine, one of the few forums where Mormons can debate these issues. Two other publications, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought and Brigham Young University Studies, provide similar opportunities. These journals enjoy considerable editorial freedom because they are not directly affiliated with the church. With a circulation of 8,000, Sunstone is the most widely read.

Elbert Peck, editor of Sunstone, says the magazine's purpose is to promote open discussion of issues relevant to Mormonism. Both liberal and conservative voices are encouraged to participate. According to Peck, Sunstone's readership is composed largely of college-educated members of the LDS community "who want to deal with their faith in a slightly more rigorous fashion than they can through the standard fare offered by the church."

Moroni's Spiritual Truth.
While those outside the faith may view the findings of the new historians as sufficient for abandoning Mormonism, the liberals reject such conclusions. Most find ways to reconcile the inconsistencies in Joseph Smith's life and writings with their perception of his divine calling. Many are convinced that the rigorous examination of any faith will result in disillusionment. In this respect, they feel they are like liberals of many traditions, believing that intelligent participation in religion requires that putting away of myths and the lowering of standards. Additionally, they approach their faith in a way that is peculiarly Mormon. To many observers, Mormonism is less a body of doctrine than it is an entirely separate culture with its own unique world view.

The LDS are culturally adapted to viewing the physical or historical evidence as largely irrelevant to the validation of spiritual truth. Spiritual matters are discerned spiritually. Mormon missionaries often introduce this concept of truth using a passage from the Book of Mormon known as "Moroni's promise"; "And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you by the power of the Holy Ghost" (Moroni 10:4).

On the strength of this prayer, LDS missionaries will testify of the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon. They don't think it's true, they know its' true, and potential converts are assured that they, too, can come to the same knowledge. The missionaries offer no archaeological evidence, nor do they give convincing internal proofs of the book's veracity. True spiritual knowledge, they insist, is gained only by praying according to the pattern found in Moroni's promise. Those who are willing to accept the challenge are often told to anticipate an answer described as anything from an overwhelming feeling of peace and love to the more traditional "burning in the bosom." They believe this is "the power of the Holy Ghost."

John Kunich was converted to Mormonism by this type of experience. "I had prayed about what [the missionaries] were asking me to study and I felt like I was being enveloped by love. It was a beautiful experience; it brought tears to my eyes. I felt it was spiritual confirmation of what I had been studying." He has had a number of subsequent experiences of a similar nature that he sees as evidence of the truthfulness of Mormonism. And his experiences are the rule, not the exception. Most of the LDS adherents interviewed for this article pointed to a similar phenomena as their foundation for belief.

Having validated their faith with subjective experiences, the liberals are inclined to subordinate findings that indicate Mormonism may be founded on shaky ground. For them, the truthfulness of Mormonism is not necessarily found in the character of Joseph Smith or the Book of Mormon, but in the experiences the religion creates.

Sandra Tanner, a recognized expert on Mormonism and a former Saint herself, believes there is another key element to the resilient faith of the liberals. Although many come to reject some tenets of the Mormon faith, they still adhere to certain basic LDS teachings. She says most liberals retain an unbiblical view of sin and God's judgment. According to Tanner, "They say, I'm a decent person; therefore, I'm going to get a good shake. . . .If there's a God, He'll be fair, so I don't have anything to worry about.' That's why they don't need to look anywhere else."

And most of them don't. They labor within an authoritarian structure that is designed for information to flow from the top down. Pragmatic leaders undoubtedly realize that a Joseph Smith who was involved in occult practices and sought to marry other men's wives is not the awe-inspiring Moses-like figure the church promotes. And while some LDS liberals feel free to debate the historicity of the Book of Mormon, church leadership has no alternative but to disregard their evidence. The New Mormon History may be accurate, but it is not acceptable.

It appears there are no easy solutions to the tension between church leadership and the liberals. The liberals are small in number, but the substance of their findings could rock the very foundations of the Mormon church and destroy the faith of many followers.

At present the church and the liberals are in an uneasy truce—one that is punctuated by occasional altercations. On November 22, 1990, the Salt Lake Tribune reported that Sunstone editor Elbert Peck had been barred by church authorities from participating in temple ceremonies because they objected to the content of a Sunstone article.

Such gestures serve to express the church's displeasure with the writers and researchers of the New Mormon History, but they do not silence them. As the tension continues to build, the liberals increasingly characterize their struggle in terms that are reminiscent of the Protestant Reformation. Perhaps they are watching and waiting for their Wittenberg door.

"THE LOST WORLD OF MORMONISM"
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, DIANE JOHNSON

• The Chinchilla Farm by Judith Freeman (Norton, 308 pp., $19.95)
• 'Doc': The Rape of the Town of Lovell by Jack Olsen (Atheneum, 479 pp., $19.95)
• The Mormon Murders: A True Story of Greed, Forgery, Deceit, and Death by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith (New American Library, 515 pp., $4.95, paper)
• Salamander: The Story of the Mormon Forgery Murders by Linda Sillitoe and Allen Roberts (Signatue Books, 570 pp., $5.95, paper)
• Windows on the Sea and Other Stories by Linda Sillitoe (Signature Books, 174 pp., $9.95, paper)

When Verna Flake, the heroine of Judith Freeman's elegiac novel The Chinchilla Farm, regrets the transience of human love, she is mourning not only the infidelity of her husband Leon, who has run off with a beauty queen, but the loss of a world centered on and ordered by the Mormon church. Leon's defection with Pinky was betrayal

at a depth I thought cruel. He had led my mother to believe (or so she had later told me) that I had been the first to stop wearing the holy underwear, and by doing so, steered us on a wrong course—one he was powerless to abandon or alter, as though the woman, as with Eve, were again to blame, responsible for what in truth was man's own complicity.

Verna and Leon had lapsed, with much defiant smoking and drinking, but the central questions in her mind remain spiritual as well as personal:

What if in our own lives it were also possible not only to swear devotion, but to follow through on such a promise? Have things changed so much? Can we still hope to live a long and full life based on a vow, putting our hearts on a deep and unquestioned track of fidelity?

One cannot help being struck by how seldom such questions are asked in modern fiction. Literary subjects undulate like hemlines with the emotional fashions of the capital, distant from vast tracts of land and millions of people whose concerns are quite other. Dramas of the loss of faith no longer have the poignancy they had for the nineteenth century; and, anyway, faith, by definition inaccessible to others and nearly inexpressible, has always been harder to make interesting than the loss of faith.

Verna's story manages to be about both. Although she has fallen away from the Mormon church, she has not altogether come to terms with the profane outside world. Raised in Utah in a large, devout family, where "everything—everything was tied to the church, it was our life, so there was this strange order to the chaos," she will exchange Zion for Los Angles, where "there were more choices in the world than I had imagined. Everything opened up when I left home, and yet, everything was at once, lost."

After Leon leaves her, she drives to LA in her pickup truck, towing a horse trailer he has given her as her share of their possessions. She stays for a while with an old friend, Jolene, and her husband, Vincent, then moves into a shabby apartment and gets a job as a dental receptionist. She is lonely and looks up family connections, including Inez, widow of a dead brother, and Inez's retarded but agreeable daughter, Christobel, who lives with an abusive old man, Jim, from whom they want to escape.

When the marriage of Vincent and Jolene breaks up, Vincent starts spending time with Verna—until she kisses him. Then he protests "I don't have those feelings," and stops coming over. (Here the trained 1980s reader will suppose that Vincent is gay.) Eventually Verna drives Inez and Christobel to Mexico, to get away from Jim. Jim follows them, and is accidentally pushed to his death by the morally unaccountable Christobel.

Verna is that rare creature, a reliable female narrator, whose preoccupations are with what she sees and learns about the world instead of with the resolution of her own story, about which she is almost taciturn. She is more articulate and confidential to the reader than she represents herself as being when she talks to the other characters, and with Vincent she is a model of the compliant female listener. Vincent is grandly rhapsodizing about history:

"Already I can see how we'll have our moment and then we'll pass, just like those other races and their cultures, those ancient trading centers, the once-flourishing hubs of the world. Do you see that?"

"I don't think so," I said. "I'm not good at history."

"Think of it," he said. . .

"I don't know," I said. "I'm not sure what you're talking about...I don't know," I said again. "I don't know about any of that."

Verna stubbornly conceals her own philosophical speculations, a response she has learned, presumably, in the atmosphere of credulity she was raised in, where skepticism was reproved, especially in females. But skepticism is a prerequisite for imaginative literature.

The world Verna Flake finds outside Utah is bleak and derelict, yet she is unafraid of it. She befriends a hitchhiker she later finds sleeping in a park that is so rough she has been warned not to go through it. When she takes off for Mexico she never reflects on the danger or unfamiliarity. Apropos of some childhood experience she has told us: "Luckily we belong to a religion that promises this won't be THE END, so we face death with courage." She is speaking ironically, of course, but only half ironically, still drawn to old certitudes. When someone complains to her that Mormons hold themselves apart, she explains by describing the secret temple rituals:

People seem pure with all that white on. All white... except the aprons: the small green apron that each person will be wearing, the shiny satin fig leaf, which restores original innocence, I guess, and turns everyone into Adams and Eves. How could you not feel exceptional?

Not coincidentally she is reading Faust, and at first pretends not to understand this fable of a bartered soul.

Verna's concerns are partly universal. Standing on the shore of the Pacific, in an Arnoldian mood, she listen to the long, withdrawing roar of the sea of faith. But some of her concerns are specifically female, conditioned by her upbringing in the tradition of Mormonism's deeply conservative ideas about women—these doubtless the legacy of the "peculiar institution" of polygamy, a singular quirk in Mormon history that still affects the whole community, although it was firmly and pragmatically repealed by a revelation to the Church president a hundred years ago.

Verna is pitying and censorious about the passivity and credulity of women, and resentful of their inferior status.

According to what Mormons believe, Leon could have seven wives in heaven, whereas I could have only one husband. It sounds complicated, but it's really very simple. It's just a kind of heavenly law, which allows men more of everything.

This contrasts with "the terrible tragedy of some women's lives, how they don't ever see the possibility of having something for themselves but only imagining themselves endlessly serving somebody, offering up the cheapest sort of cheer, and all the while denying their pain." There is something out of time here. Female resignation has been dismissed, though not in real life, at least as a fashionable subject of fiction, which in its movement from George Eliot to, say, Erica Jong has gone on to other formulations of women's situation. The real world, of course, is something else.

In Verna Flake's fictional world, her bleak fable of loss and confusion changes course with an ending one is unprepared for either by current literary fashion, principles of realism, or internal logic. Only in generic terms does it make sense, and even seem correct: Verna and Vincent are married. Moreover, he turns out to be a sensitive, rich, artistic man with a Mercedes Benz convertible—a veritable savior. It is no accident that Pinky, the woman Verna's first husband ran off with, was a runner-up beauty queen, icon of female submissiveness to male fantasy, and very much the Mormon ideal. Although Verna professes to despise what Pinky represents, the author's reward to Verna in part affirms these values: marriage, return to Utah, and reintegration into her family, and—what was missing in her life with Leon—a baby. And yet she is not without a sense of having made a fateful bargain. She has come, she says, to understand Faust. In a sort of reverse pastoral, she has journeyed from innocence (Utah) to knowledge (the city) back to innocence (motherhood, which in fiction always restores innocence). If a religious mind can impose an optimistic pattern on the unpromising materials of reality, it is an alternative given to authors too.

The fury of Islam about The Satanic Verses provided an exotic example of the disappointments awaiting religious people and religious societies in a secular and pluralistic world, but many examples can also be found, evidently, in the intermountain West. A number of books and news stories in the past year concerning crimes committed by and/or on Mormons provide extreme real world correlatives of the emotional situations in The Chinchilla Farm. The rapes of perhaps a hundred or more women in Lovell, by their baptist doctor, who for years had convinced them that he was merely doing something medical to them behind their shrouded knees, would seem comic and incredible if the combination of passivity, ignorance, and credulity it testifies to were not itself so horrible. These were sexually ignorant women, trained to trustful acceptance of authority, who hadn't liked to doubt, or to think that the doctor would do anything wrong, or to tell their husbands or make trouble, so that it took years for suspicion to gather in the collective mind with enough force to bring him to justice. According to Jack Olsen's tactful and repulsively fascinating account in "Doc": The Rape of the Town of Lovell, even after his conviction, the town remained divided, with many still unable to believe in Dr. Story's guilt.

The strange bomb murders in Salt Lake City were of course more horrible still, and stronger example of the rage and misery that can accompany loss of faith, for here, though there were human victims, the target was the Mormon church itself, and the murderer a disappointed apostate who had set out to alter its very history.

Writing in these pages in 1985, the Yale historian David Brion Davis noted "two important and recently discovered letters" which together "confirm[ed] the view that [Joseph] Smith was deeply immersed in the folk magic of the early nineteenth century." This would challenge Smith's own account of how he had found golden tablets containing the Book of Mormon. According to Smith, an angel appeared to him and showed him where to find the tablets. The most important of the two letters made "no mention of angels or other divine figures but refers instead to a spirit 'that transfigured himself from a white salamander,'" and thus became known as the Salamander letter, of central importance to Mormon technological history if true, and embarrassing to received accounts because it implied that Mormonism had its origins in Smith's involvement with popular folk magic practiced during this time, a claim denied by the Church.

These letters, which had originally been suspected by some fundamentalist Mormons to be fakes, had been subjected to careful scrutiny by experts and, it seemed to Professor Davis and others, had been proved to be "almost certainly authentic." Professor Davis was writing in August 1985. In October the original purchaser of one of the letters, who had then donated it to the Church, was murdered by a nail-encrusted pipe bomb. Some people at first suspected that the crime could be the work of Mormon fanatics, perhaps even members of the Church security forces bent on punishing those who had anything to do with the Salamander letter.

Two things compelled this suspicion: a tradition of violent fanaticism at the fringe of the bourgeois orderliness of Mormon life in the Western states, and the vulnerability of the Mormon church to historic revision. The Mormon church is at the mercy of history in a way the ancient religions are not. While no one expects at this date to find evidence that Moses really didn't find any tablets, the pertinent events in Mormon history were so recent that things might easily turn up that could alter or refute cherished beliefs.

The first murder was followed by a second, of the wife of another prominent Mormon, for whom the bomb had probably been intended. Then a third bomb went off accidentally, injuring a man who was soon suspected of having concocted it. This was Mark Hoffman, the Salt Lake City dealer in rare documents who had sold the Salamander letter to the man he later killed. Hofmann would eventually be convicted of the two murders, and it would emerge that he was an unusually accomplished forger.

Hofmann, in an interesting account by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, and in another by Linda Sillitoe, was a model Mormon boy whose childhood, not unlike Verna Flake's, was bound up in Church activities, family solidarity, and, in his case, the shadow of polygamy in the form of a polygamous grandmother whose painful secret the family did not like to discuss. Mormons, unlike Australians, who celebrate their convict ancestors, are disapproving of and reticent about this aspect of their history.2

If there are crimes peculiar to the rootless and alienated, perhaps there are crimes peculiar to the apostate steeply enmeshed in his roots. Rewriting history, like writing fiction, requires a liberating skepticism. In fact, credulity is often explicitly punished in imaginative fiction, which is itself generated, perhaps, when reality becomes unacceptable. Verna was lucky to have the privileged insulation of a literary sensibility or, one might say, a less direct and more socially acceptable way of rewriting history than Mark Hofmann had.

It developed that Hofmann had forged hundreds of documents relating to Mormon history, most of them twisting that history, and had sold many of them directly to the Church or to wealthy Utah businessmen who piously donated them to the Church, which in turn placed them beyond reach in its most secret archives. Hofmann, in debt and undoubtedly unbalanced, could be seen as just a crazy criminal, but the pointed direction, the special bitterness, of his crime against the structures of an edifice that had ceased to sustain him reminds one in a way of Verna Flake's gentler pain.

Naifeh and Smith cast a cold eye on the paranoid style and autocratic methods of the Mormon church's upper echelon, which mostly refused to cooperate with the prosecution of Hofmann, claiming immunities usually reserved for national security. Like many other religions the Mormon church appears to be attracted to guns, nationhood, and divinely sanctioned lawbreaking. With a security division run by former FBI agents, it was prepared for enemies. Naifeh and Smith quote the defensive response of a high Church official, Boyd K. Packer, to the bomb incidents: "When you are at war,...and we are, security is crucial."

So was secrecy. Initially, the manner in which Hofmann's case was prosecuted reflected the ambivalence the Mormon community felt about the possibility that a good Mormon boy could be irreclaimably evil, its wish to preserve him alive to sort out the errors he had seeded into their theological history, and the embarrassment the Church felt about having been taken in. Was the "Blessing" genuine, wherein Joseph Smith designated his son Joseph Smith III, not Brigham Young, as his true successor? Or the letter that says that Alvin Smith, not Joseph, found the tablets first? Hofmann was allowed to plea bargain and never went on trial, on the understanding that in return for a guilty plea he would be sentenced as though for manslaughter. (In the end, however, a renegade Board of Pardons enforced a life sentence.) Naifeh and Smith quote an observer's explanation for the relaxed attitude of the prosecution: "Hey...you don't rise in this state embarrassing the Mormon Church or making them look bad."

Unlike Naifeh and Smith, Linda Sillitoe, coauthor of another, and in some ways more informed, book on the Hofmann case, Salamander: The Story of the Mormon Forgery Murders, and author of a new collection of short stories, Windows on the Sea, writes from within the Mormon fold. Though she is more indulgent of Church organization and practices (and probably more knowledgeable), Sillitoe too illumines a darker side of Mormonism—the petty tyrannies, rigidity and lack of charity, the rivalries that creep into all hierarchies, the internal spying, and the generally subservient role women are expected to play.

Taken together the stories constitute an interesting report on the state of daily life among the faithful, and especially a glimpse into a world of unreconstructed femininity. The reader will be struck by a sense of anachronism. The concerns of the women characters are perfectly contemporary—they are single parents or career women or disappointed in love—but the context is more like the early 1950s, before they might have read Betty Friedan, or as if they lived somewhere else instead of in a kind of Shangri-La of the Wasatch, from which, upon leaving, Verna Flake aged in a day. Here are characters from small Utah towns who think even Salt Lake City is a drug-ridden sink of vice. They have baby names like Marci or Luci or Janeece, and their anxieties have to do with love or baking. Their many acts of kindness—taking food or offering counsel—are counterbalanced by the implicit female competitiveness that seems to characterize societies in which women's status depends on men. They constantly and sometimes cruelly assess one another's hair and figures, and console themselves that their roles as wives and housekeepers are secretly powerful, or as useful as men's.

Shauna's streaky hair was perfectly coifed. Gina knew her own auburn curls looked fine, tumbling over the aqua fabric, but she wanted to run to the mirror to check.

Ken could kid her all he wanted about her becoming bishop's counselor. She'd never hoped to hold that kind of position herself, and had no quarrel with the men and their priesthood. All her life she had watched her mother and other women run what she considered the real priorities in religious life.

Sillitoe's women characters have not yet been struck with resentment that their lives are in the control of often sanctimonious and unattractive male Church functionaries, or that some local man who by reason of his position within the Church could, as in these stories, excommunicate an unwed mother, or humiliate and criticize working women because they aren't married. But they have noticed, a necessary preliminary to the questions that will follow, as they did for Verna Flake. It is significant that in the story that comes closest to expressing reservations about the methods and values of the Church, the questions are put into the mind of a male character, as if a female author could not quite attribute these dangerous perceptions to a female character. At the weekly testimonial Marc, who has been having a crisis of confidence about his vocation in the Church, hears his wife anxiously proclaim her domesticity, and it is he who sees her unhappiness and sacrifice:

"I love to cook," Kris was saying tightly. "I love playing with my children. I'm very lucky to have them."

What is she doing? Marc asked himself. Then he realized she was reciting her credentials, her passport for safe passage. She didn't mention her college degree or her dancing experience.

But, it is emphasized, Marc is not losing faith itself, just finding a more direct relation to God. A curious detail—in many of the stories, the characters recount their dreams, and discuss them as if these communications from the unconscious had special force in the lives of people trapped in a waking world of social control, peer pressure, and a conformity that limits them while giving them security.

It was the loss of innocent trust in a good world, even more than physical violation, that ruined many lives in Lovell, Wyoming. The people in Sillitoe's stories show concern for others, charity, politeness, they examine themselves for moral faults—in all a little reminiscent of the Sunday School stories of our childhood, or of the innocence of a Victorian world like Mrs. Caskell's Cranford, where, having a good character is valued. Though she pokes a little fun at it, Verna Flake is also proud of the good Mormon character. When she and her mother are involved in a car accident with a couple from Wisconsin, Verna's mother loves the chance "to demonstrate the good qualities of Mormons to some outsiders—qualities like friendliness, for instance, and forgiveness." Wallace Stegner, raised among Mormons, notes in his essay in Growing up Western3 both the Mormon interest in history and in good character, and the value placed on transmitting moral training—something the rest of society, apparently divided over what constitutes a good character, often seems to have given up trying to do:

We discovered the Mormon Institution known as Mutual, for Mutual Improvement Association, which every Tuesday evening in every ward house in Zion, provided everything from Boy Scout meetings and Bible classes to basketball leagues and teenage dances. There may have been a covert proselytizing motive in the welcome that the wards extended to strange gentile kids, but there was a lot of plain warmth and goodwill, too. I have never ceased to be grateful for what they gave us when what they gave mattered a great deal, and though I was never tempted to adopt their beliefs, I could never write about them, when it came to that, except as a friend. Their obsession with their history, too, made me aware that I had grown up entirely without history, and set me on the trail to construct some for myself.

The writers of the jacket copy both for The Chinchilla Farm and for Freeman's earlier collection of stories, Family Attractions, use the word "exotic" to refer to Mormon life, but of course Mormonism is not exotic, it is indigenous—is perhaps the only indigenous American religion. Beginning in the burned-over district of upstate New York at a time of general religious fervor, moving with the westward expansion, Mormon history recapitulates American history, only it is a few decades behind and changes more slowly. The opposition of the Mormon church to the ERA, for instance, shows a conservative view of women's role but not one different from ideas of women's role defined by the larger society thirty or forty years ago, when many women might have seen their lives as Verna sees the lives of the self-sacrificing women she knows. In a way that should give them pause, Mormons can see in what the rest of American society is becoming what may await them, too. That they have chosen to resist is not therefore very surprising. Whether it is possible is another question.

There are more Mormons in the US than Episcopalians, and the membership in the Church is rapidly growing, with almost seven millon in 1988, and more than 200,000 conversion in that year. They are peculiarly situated to profit from the national experience, and moreover possess two advantages—a respect for history that the rest of society seems to lack, and a mechanism for change, for the Prophet/President can receive revelations—that could lead them to make the same mistakes as the rest of society or help to avert them, especially in the case of women. The elderly patriarchs can no doubt slow down the rate of change in women's attitudes by exhortations to obedience and praise of motherhood, but to judge from these books they are not likely to succeed. Exhortation rarely works very well against human nature. It would be nice if God would reveal to Ezra Taft Benson (now the Prophet) a definition of "moral values" that has not been tarnished by the Reagan/Moral Majority use of the term to confirm exploitation and selfishness, and then a way of preserving them that all of society could benefit from.

Despite Verna Flake's own partial disaffection (she is still sipping wine at the end of her story), the world she leaves at the beginning is the one she finally affirms. But the tone of the novel, its mournful note of gentle irony, seems to arise from her understanding, based on her look at the world outside Utah, that American history is not on the side of "qualities like friendliness ...and forgiveness," whatever may be the power of conservative institutions like the Mormon Church to preserve these qualities among its membership; while the darker side of Mormonism seems to entangle Mormons in our collective destiny.
------------------
1. Secrets of the Mormons," The New York Review, August 15, 1985
2. Many sources, including Naifeh and Smith, confirm that more than thirty thousand people still live in polygamy, mostly in southern Utah and Arizona. Not only is the practice ongoing, it seems to be tolerated by the larger community, perhaps because at one time or another it touched most Mormon families, or perhaps they just don't see it as that odd. If something can be said for it, one legacy of polygamy seems to be a more straightforward and cheerful, though conservative, attitude to sex among Mormons than one finds in religions dominated by ideas of hellfire or the virtues of celibacy. One wonders whether some of the initial success of Smith's cause might be owned to his straightforward appeal to the Sultanic side of his confreres.
In any case, polygamy may be on the way back. The Supreme Court is agreeing to hear an adoption case to determine whether a polygamous man can adopt the children by another marriage of one of his wives, after her death. The adoption is opposed by relatives of the children who fear that the man will force the daughter into a polygamous marriage, probably with himself. The ACLU has filed a brief on behalf of the polygamist on the grounds, according to newspaper accounts, of religious freedom.
In a country like ours, without widely shared moral traditions, we tend to tolerate almost anything people say is a part of their religion—funny clothes, dope smoking, fishing out of season. Probably a line does exist between constitutionally protected religious beliefs and social customs that are seen as offensive, for instance animal sacrifice in Santeria. But the line seems to change all the time.]
3. Clarus Backes, ed., Growing Up Western (Knopf, 1989)]

"RECENT MORMON FICTION"
UTAH HUMANITIES COUNCIL NEWSLETTER, LAVINA FIELDING ANDERSON
The Home Literature Harvest
In 1888, Orson F. Whitney, a Mormon bishop, historian, and poet, called upon LDS youth to turn away from the novels of the gentiles and feast upon "home literature," a "pure and powerful" expression of gospel themes that would one day be written by "Miltons and Shakespeares of our own." Thus was formalized the home literature movement, which included in its first decades such Mormon luminaries as Whitney himself, Susa Young Gates, Emmeline B. Wells, B.H. Roberts.

Home literature has blossomed ever since, sometimes vibrant, sometimes anemic. Between the 1940s and the 1970s, it expressed itself mostly in short stories and poetry in official periodicals, but full-length novels were scarce. The few Mormon publishers didn't print them because they felt that few Mormon readers would buy them so few Mormon writers wrote them. Now there are more publishers, more writers, and far, far more readers. The bulging list of titles included in this review alone evidence the plenitude.

In addition to hefty quantity, the quality of Mormon fiction is also healthy. Techniques are more sophisticated, plots are more trendy and complex, settings are modern—many outside Utah, and characters are more believable. True, most of home literature is "insider" fiction: conundrums, myths, shibboleths, evocations, and resolutions that grow sturdily out of Mormonism's rich ethnicity and contribute fruitfully to that culture. Still, a significant number of books have crossed some perceptible threshold of accessibility to become meaningful to a broader audience—becoming insider/outsider fiction. This is not the same as outsider/insider fiction; non-Mormon writers have always admired the possibilities of exploiting Mormonism's exoticism, but Mormon readers have been quick to identify and reject such strip-mining. Insider/outsider fiction establishes a more demanding—and more respectful—relationship. Maurine Whipple's The Giant Joshua, published in 1941 and indisputably the classic of Mormon fiction, is the premier example.

Insider Fiction
In the past, an outsize proportion of insider fiction has been historic. This genre, which critic Richard Cracroft affectionately calls "twice-told truths," stopped being my favorite some time ago since it attracts more than its share of cliche's and often fails to distinguish adequately between individual and institutional experience.

However, private caveats aside, there are still important contributions to this genre. Genrald N. Lund's Like a Fire Is Burning (Bookcraft, 1991), Volume 2 of his historic series The Work and the Glory, was named one winner of the Association for Mormon Letter's 1991 novel prize. (The other one went to Orson Scott Card's science fiction novel Xenocide, indicating as perhaps nothing else the energous embrace of Mormon literature today.) Volume 1, Pillar of Light, covers the New York period of Mormon history as encountered by the Steed family. Like a Fire Is Burning brings the Steeds and Mormonism's nascent community to Kirtland, Ohio. These novels are carefully researched and convincingly—not over-dramatically—written. From the fresher setting of the Mormon Mexican colonies during Pancho Villa's revolution comes Jay A. Parry's tale of revenge and redemption, The Burning (Deseret Book, 1991, $8.95, 224 pp.) ...

Insider/Outsider Fiction
Insider/Outsider fiction takes a different stance: Mormonism may be the subject, but the author's focus is character, the writing is more complex than cautionary. Walter Kirn, author of My Hard Bargain (New York: Knopf, 1990), won an Association of Mormon Letters prize in 1991 with these thirteen stories. Most slide casually and matter-of-factly through a Mormon consciousness, presenting a culture that is respected, loved, turned over, and transformed into art. The stories—poignant, outrageous, perplexed—contain perfect sentences: "The active ingredient in Vicks Vaporub is nostalgia" (p.86).

Signature Books, a publishing house that was doing serious Mormon fiction when few others were, has contributed three volumes of short stories in the last two years, all with brightly contemporary designs and memorable writing by some of Mormonism's best-known writers. Levi Peterson's Night Soil (1990, $14.95, 192 pp.) is a vivid gallery of characters from Mormon country that includes my hands-down favorite, his comic "The Third Nephite." It is a worthy companion to The Backslider (Signature Books, 1986, $12.95, 361 pp.), far ahead of the competition, in my opinion, for best contemporary Mormon novel and winner of the AML novel prize. Michael Fillerup's stories in Visions (1990, $9.95, 208 pp.) are powerful and brooding examinations of the anguish of human experience. I found particularly moving his stories set on the Indian reservations of southern Utah. (Another interesting collection of stories, some of them also Indian, is Linda Sillitoe's sure-handed Windows on the Sea, published a year earlier, also by Signature.) John Bennion's deft, sometimes painful, sometime good-humored collection, Breeding Leah and Other Stories (1991, $14.95, 157 pp.), explores obdurate realities with often-baffled narrators who remind us of ourselves.

Signature should also be commended for making available to the world Elouise Bell's hard-headed, soft-hearted, and indisputably hilarious collection of humorous essays, Only When I Laugh (1990, $9.95, pp. 130) It also published two exceptionally fine and beautifully designed volumes of poetry: The Owl on the Aerial by Clarice Short (1990, $14.95, 174 pp.), with extraordinarily illuminating biographical material, and Emma Lou Thayne's stunning Things Happen: Poems of Survival (1991, $18.95, 80 pp.). These welcome poems join her vital collection of thoughtful personal essays and dazzling poetry, As for Me and My House (Bookcraft, 1989, $8.95, 115 pp.).

"THE YEAR IN REVIEW"
IRREANTUM (ASSOCIATION FOR MORMON LETTERS), ANDREW HALL
Generally I believe the world of Mormon literature is moving in a healthy direction. There are not nearly enough adventurous and original works being produced, but there are a few, and I get the impression that the general writing level of the authors producing mainstream inspirational and/or escapist works is improving. Certainly there is lots of dreck, but that is true of all areas of the publishing world. If consumers of Mormon literature want to find quality material, it is out there waiting for them. ...

Turning now to the major Mormon publishers (Covenant, Deseret, Cedar Fort, Signature, and Granite), they produced fifty-eight literature titles in 2002, a record number. This was largely due to a significant increase in the number produced by Covenant and Cedar Fort. Deseret Book, Signature, and Granite published about the same amount as they did in 2001.

Of the many authors publishing for the LDS market over the last few years, I feel Margaret Blair Young has created the most significant body of work. She seems to specialize in pain, probing great hardships and suffering in nearly all her novels. Last year she pulled off the nice feat of having works published by Deseret Book and Signature in the same year (last achieved by Ann Cannon in 1997). In both books she goes to the edge of Mormon cultural respectability, ultimately affirming faith in the gospel and allegiance to the church but also exploring the pain and doubt felt by Mormons who have been cut to the core by other Mormons or God Himself. I found Bound for Canaan (Deseret), the second volume of the "Standing on the Promises" series co-written with Darius Gray, to be among the most achingly beautiful works I have read in years. In their descriptions of the lives of black church members during the church's frontier period, Young and Gray put together a kaleidoscope of characters and settings, jumping back and forth between at least ten recurring points of view, up from the four or so in the first volume. Rather than making the story disjointed, however, the multiple voices become a symphony of faith and pain which I haven't been able to get out of my head nearly a year after I read it.

Her other novel, Heresies of Nature (Signature), is also a study of the anguish of believers, this time about the shattering impact of multiple sclerosis on a woman and her family. Several members of the family turn to self-destructive behaviors in response to the pressure and despair, and the husband, worn down by the decade-long sacrifices of caring for an invalid wife, turns against God and violates his temple covenants. In the end the family members repent of their rebellions and pin their psyches on God-centered hope. It is a tattered kind of hope, which does not erase the pain of the disease and the sins but does keep the family together.

Two other novels published for the Mormon market I can wholeheartedly recommend are Linda Hoffman Kimball's The Marketing of Sister B (Signature) and Dean Hughes's Troubled Waters (Deseret). Linda Kimball, in a gentle but very funny farce, tells the story of a woman catapulted to national fame by the reaction to a perfume she created for a Relief Society event. Since Kathryn Kidd has gone serveral years without releasing a novel, Linda Kimball has taken her place as the Mormon novelist who can best make me laugh without leaving a saccharine aftertaste. ...

Signature boasts the highest overall literary standards of the LDS publishing world, although they have averaged only two literary pieces a year for the last several years. This year they published two quality novels by Margaret Blair Young and Linda Hoffman Kimball. Critics of Signature might be surprised to hear that both are, at their core, "faithful" novels.

"IN RELIGION STUDIES, UNIVERSITIES BEND TO VIEWS OF FAITHFUL"
Wall Street Journal, DANIEL GOLDEN

RANCHO CUCAMONGA, Calif. -- In 1993, the Mormon church excommunicated D. Michael Quinn, one of the world's foremost authorities on the faith, whose writings had frequently contradicted the church's traditional history.

Now, he has become a pariah in some higher-education circles as well.

Although Mormon studies is a fast-growing academic discipline, Mr. Quinn -- a former professor at Mormon-run Brigham Young University and the author of six books on Mormon history -- can't find a job. In 2004, he was the leading candidate for openings at two state universities. Both rejected him.

At least three other secular schools plan new professorships in Mormon studies, but he appears to be a long shot for these posts, too -- not because he lacks qualifications, but because almost all the funding for the jobs is coming from Mormon donors.

"At this point, I'm unhireable," says the 62-year-old scholar, who lives with his mother to save money in this town east of Los Angeles.

Mr. Quinn's struggles reflect the rising influence of religious groups over the teaching of their faiths at secular colleges, despite concerns about academic freedom. U.S. universities have usually hired religious-studies professors regardless of whether they practiced or admired the faiths they researched. But some universities are bending to the views of private donors and state legislators by hiring the faithful.

"If you want to succeed in Mormon studies you have to make compromises and you have to tread gently," says Colleen McDannell, a professor of American religions at the University of Utah. "Michael would not do that."

W. Rolfe Kerr, commissioner of education for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the faith's formal name, said Mr. Quinn is "highly regarded in his discipline" and the church would not "campaign against him" for any academic post. However, Mr. Kerr said, "there may be a perception" of Mr. Quinn in the Mormon community "that would cause him, in the eyes of some, to be less acceptable."

Some professors at both state universities that rejected Mr. Quinn say fear of offending Mormons played a role. Deans at the universities deny that.

In the 1970s, some universities pioneered the idea of privately funded professorships in specific religions by establishing Judaic-studies chairs. Now many universities have chairs for faiths ranging from Islam to Sikhism. They are usually underwritten by donors of the same religion, who generally expect that the scholar filling the chair will be sympathetic to the faith.

Former Princeton University president William G. Bowen says there are similar issues in many other areas of academic study such as unionism, which is why university presidents and trustees prefer professorships to cover broader areas. "What the university shouldn't do is allow the donor control over the hire or the curriculum," says Mr. Bowen, who is now president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

"Every single department of religion is negotiating with religious communities in new ways," says Laurie Patton, chairwoman of the religion department at Emory University, a private, secular school in Atlanta.

In 1999, the Aquinas Center, a Roman Catholic organization affiliated with Emory, agreed to endow a new chair in Catholic studies. Emory selected Mark Jordan of the University of Notre Dame for the post. But the board of the Aquinas Center objected, according to Emory faculty members and Victor Kramer, a former Aquinas board member and executive director. Prof. Jordan is homosexual and wrote a critical history of Catholicism's attitude toward sodomy.

Emory shifted Prof. Jordan to a university-funded position in religion that wasn't specific to Catholicism, according to Mr. Kramer and Barbara DeConcini, who headed the faculty search committee. Plans for the chair were shelved. An Emory spokeswoman says the center was concerned it might not be able to afford the gift.

The school of religion at Claremont Graduate University, a private institution in Claremont, Calif., has raised $2.5 million, pledged primarily by California Muslims, for a new endowed professorship in Islamic studies. It hired a Muslim last year to fill it. Claremont has plans to raise funds for at least seven more religious chairs -- in Mormonism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism and Coptic Orthodoxy.

For each position, Claremont has established an advisory council composed mainly of believers. Councils are expected to raise funds and have a voice in hiring via a representative on the search committee. "We don't want any bomb-throwers" in the chairs, says Karen Torjesen, dean of Claremont's religion school.

Emory's Prof. DeConcini, who is also executive director of the American Academy of Religion, the main association of professors in the field, says Claremont's approach "is potentially fraught with difficulties for academic freedom." Claremont officials say they are preserving academic freedom because the university, not the search committee, makes the final hiring decision.

Harvard University's divinity school is close to filling a professorship in evangelical theological studies funded by Alonzo L. McDonald, an evangelical Christian and former White House staff director who runs a Michigan investment group. Mr. McDonald says the scholar should be "understanding and empathetic" toward evangelical traditions. Harvard's general counsel advised the school that it cannot legally ask job applicants about their religious beliefs. The 1964 Civil Rights Act bans religious discrimination in hiring at secular schools.

The school's faculty recently recommended hiring a specialist in evangelical history whose work is unlikely to ruffle the faithful, say faculty members.

Larger Presence

Mormon studies are growing in popularity as the church expands. It now boasts 5.6 million members in the U.S. and 12.5 million world-wide. Mormons are becoming a larger presence at secular universities now that church-run BYU has capped its enrollment because of limited resources.

Like many minority religious groups, Mormons have faced a history of prejudice that shapes their identity today. A mob assassinated the faith's founder, Joseph Smith, in 1844 and the federal government hounded Mormons with troops and punitive legislation.

Mr. Quinn's battles with the church and BYU have shadowed his career. Born in Pasadena, Calif., he is a seventh-generation Mormon on his mother's side. She raised him in her faith after his Catholic father divorced her. Mr. Quinn became curious about Mormon history in high school, when a friend gave him a memoir about a Mormon leader who practiced polygamy after the church banned the practice in 1890. "I was jolted by the reality that there could be a public stance and private behavior that contradicted each other," he says.

After graduating from BYU, Mr. Quinn earned his doctorate at Yale, and then joined the BYU faculty in 1976. He buried himself in the church archives, typing thousands of pages of notes that would provide raw material for his articles and books.

Such research ran into head winds in the 1980s as the church restricted access to documents. Boyd Packer, one of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles that helps rule the church, declared in a 1981 speech that writing and teaching about church history "may be a faith destroyer."

Sensitive Subjects

Mr. Quinn nonetheless published articles on sensitive subjects such as one in 1985 that suggested church leaders tolerated polygamy after officially prohibiting it. He says BYU restricted his research and denied him travel money. In 1988, he resigned from the university. BYU says it didn't force him to go.

Five years later, the president of his Salt Lake City stake -- a Mormon administrative unit composed of five to 10 congregations -- handed Mr. Quinn a letter citing examples of his alleged apostasy. They included his public criticism of the church for limiting dissent and an article maintaining that Joseph Smith treated Mormon women more equally than the church does today. He was soon excommunicated along with four other scholars.

Mr. Quinn's personal life contributed to his estrangement from the church. The father of four was divorced in 1985 and came out publicly as a homosexual in 1996 when he published a book about same-sex friendships and romances in 19th-century Mormonism. The church condemns homosexual behavior. Mr. Quinn says he still believes in the "fundamentals" of Mormonism but doesn't practice the faith.

Supporting himself on research grants and fellowships, Mr. Quinn cemented his scholarly reputation by publishing four books on Mormon history between 1994 and 1998, including a two-volume study of the church's interactions with politics and American society. In 1999, he began pursuing a full-time faculty job, to no avail. Few secular schools at the time sought a specialist in Mormonism.

In 2003, when he was a visiting professor at Yale University, BYU threatened to withdraw funding for a conference it was co-sponsoring with Yale on Mormonism if Mr. Quinn was allowed to speak there, according to the conference's organizer, Kenneth West. Noel Reynolds, a longtime BYU administrator and now a Mormon mission president in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., says the university was concerned that "the conference not be used to promote personalities or personal complaints about the church." Yale officials insisted on the participation of Mr. Quinn, who ultimately resolved the dispute by agreeing to introduce the keynote speaker rather than give a scholarly paper.

The following year, Mr. Quinn was the only finalist for a tenured professorship in Utah and Mormon history at the University of Utah. At Mr. Quinn's request, Thomas Alexander, a BYU historian, wrote a recommendation for him. But while Prof. Alexander praised him as a scholar and teacher in his recommendation, he advised against hiring Mr. Quinn, warning that the Mormon-dominated state legislature might cut the public university's funding.

When Mr. Quinn came to the school's Salt Lake City campus for a job interview, history professor James Clayton hosted a reception for him. Prof. Clayton had been Mr. Quinn's friend for years, and joined him in criticizing church censorship. He describes Mr. Quinn as the second-best historian of Mormonism, behind retired Columbia University professor Richard Bushman.

Nevertheless, when Utah's faculty voted on whether to offer Mr. Quinn the job, Prof. Clayton opposed him. Now retired, he says: "There was a concern by several of us in the department that Mike was not the right person to head up any kind of Mormon history or Mormon studies program given the fact he's very publicly excommunicated. There would be quite a number of people in the Mormon community who would look unfavorably on that. That gave me pause."

Robert Newman, dean of humanities at Utah, says the history department decided against hiring Mr. Quinn because his research presentation wasn't strong enough and most of his books weren't published by university presses. Utah eventually downgraded the opening to an assistant professorship and filled it with an active Mormon church member.

Soon another school beckoned. Arizona State University's department of religious studies recommended to the university administration that Mr. Quinn be offered a one-year appointment for 2004-05. It was starting a doctoral-degree program with a focus on religion in the Americas. Aware that Mr. Quinn was controversial, the faculty took pains to stress to administrators that his scholarship was first-rate, says Tracy Fessenden, a professor of American religions.

A public university with 61,500 students, Arizona State has been cultivating Mormon students and donors -- for example, by letting students resume receiving scholarships after returning from Mormon missionary work, says ASU president Michael Crow. Many of Arizona's Mormons, about 6% of the state's population, are concentrated in the Phoenix area near the university.

Ira Fulton, a Mormon home builder in Prescott, Ariz., has given the school at least $155 million since 2003. Mr. Fulton says the school has 3,700 Mormon students, and "I'd like to have 6,000, 7,000, 8,000 or 10,000. They'll make ASU a better university."

ASU's administration vetoed Mr. Quinn's hiring. Simon Peacock, then associate dean for personnel, says Mr. Quinn lacked expertise to teach Christianity and Judaism courses left uncovered by a professor's departure. Mr. Peacock says Mr. Quinn's excommunication was discussed but had no effect on the decision.

However, the chairman of the religious-studies department, Joel Gereboff, wrote in an email to faculty that Dean Peacock and another dean asked him to review the "risks and benefits" of the hire and "thought that it is probably not wise to undertake such risks" for a one-year appointment. Prof. Gereboff says the deans were referring to the risk of alienating the Mormon community.

Several professors criticized the decision. "What the administration is doing is as wrong as racial or sexual discrimination," James Foard, a religious-studies professor, emailed colleagues. The administrators stood their ground.

Prof. Gereboff says he could "live with" the deans' decision. "We exercise sensitivity. We don't exercise censorship," he says.

Mr. Fulton, the donor, says he doesn't get involved in faculty hiring. He calls Mr. Quinn a "nothing person."

At least three other schools are contemplating chairs in Mormon studies -- Claremont Graduate University, the University of Wyoming and Utah State. At Claremont, the school of religion has nearly completed raising $5 million for a Mormon studies chair to be named after Howard W. Hunter, a late president of the church. Nearly all the money has come from Mormon businessmen in the state, the school says. Prof. Torjesen, the religion-school dean, traveled to church headquarters in Salt Lake City to build rapport with church leaders. The school's Mormon-studies advisory council includes two BYU professors among its dozen members.

Claremont says it prefers that the holder of the chair have access to church archives in Salt Lake City, a privilege sometimes denied dissidents. Mr. Quinn's access, withdrawn on his excommunication, was restored in 1997 and the church has made more documents available in recent years. Asked whether Mr. Quinn might be hired, Claremont's associate dean of religion, Patrick Horn, replies: "Probably not."

At Wyoming, where Mormons comprise about 10% of students, a committee headed by a professor of Spanish, Kevin Larsen, is exploring a Mormon-studies professorship. Mr. Larsen, himself a Mormon bishop, says he wouldn't rule out critics of the faith for such a post. But he says he has explained to church leaders that "it's not going to be a chair of anti-Mormon studies."

Wyoming is also sponsoring a lecture series on Mormonism. Prof. Larsen says the local Mormon stake provided several hundred dollars for the lectures through a Mormon student group.

Utah State has attracted more than 50 donors, most of them Mormons, for a professorship in Mormon history. History chairman Norman Jones says it's premature to discuss job candidates. He says the university will look for "a person who can get along with everybody. We know what the minefields are, and we're trying to avoid them."

Mr. Quinn says his only significant income since leaving Yale was a $40,000 bequest from a Los Angeles doctor, contingent on his writing a biography of his late benefactor. So far, he has received $15,000, with the balance to come when the book is finished.

In the meantime, Mr. Quinn sleeps on a futon in his mother's condominium and says he can't afford health insurance, car repairs or Internet access. His library of books on Mormon and American social history lies boxed up in her garage and closets

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