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Faith Crisis, Volume 2: Behind Closed Doors: Leonard Arrington & the Progressive Rewriting of Mormon History
During the 20th century, an organized objective to rewrite Latter-day Saint history from within, unbeknownst to the general Church membership, went head to head behind the scenes with traditional leaders of the Church. Meet the main players of this Leonard Arrington—progressive “Father of New Mormon History,” Ezra Taft Benson—traditionalist defender, and many other advocates of traditionalist and progressive Latter-day Saint history. As traditionalists and progressives sparred during the 1970s-1980s, a covert cold war commenced in Salt Lake City, Utah, with the progressives spying on the traditionalists, and the traditionalists spying on the progressives. Secret informants, leaked documents, falsified reports, and even employed pseudonyms—all were part of this struggle to dominate Latter-day Saint history. But how did, and does, this secret conflict affect you? Progressives, working in the Church History Department and at Brigham Young University, claimed 40 years ago that it would take a generation to re-educate the Church. Where are we now in that re-education?
- GenresReligion
340 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 21, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 6, 2024
Instead of addressing glaring issues with their argument, the authors double down on the evil Arrington and juxtapose him with President Benson to present their interpretation a view of what Mormonism is and should remain. This books polarizes and burns bridges. It does not build faith, nor present a current view of what the living prophets are doing with church history.
November 18, 2023
This second volume suffers from all of the basic flaws that I outlined in my review of the first: poor writing, particularly repetition (some of the most egregious examples: the Arrington diary agreement is explained three times by page 10, a single quotation is repeated three times in two pages on 246-247, and a footnote of multiple paragraphs is reproduced verbatim!); factual errors; strange editing decisions; weasel words; and most importantly, claims without citations, which absolutely abound (e.g., xiii, 26, 42, 188, 196, 198, 200 n.27, 213, 234, 249, 285). Since I covered these kinds of problems in my review of the first volume, I’ll focus here on an overarching problem that further illustrates the cavalier approach to accuracy that I identified in my previous review: the treatment of primary and secondary sources.
For example, the authors write, “[Leonard] Arrington appears to have had no experience with the appearance of God, the appearance of angels, the gift of tongues, or inspired dreams, and his ‘testimony’ seems to have been rooted more in the intellect and possibly mystical experience, as opposed to spiritual manifestations.” (26-27). They then say, “In distinct contrast, when speaking directly with regard to the recounting of Latter-day Saint history, President [Ezra Taft] Benson explained that ‘No writer can ever accurately portray a prophet of God if he or she does not believe in prophecy.’” (27). Even accepting both these quotations as true for the sake of argument, how can they be considered “[i]n distinct contrast” when the summary of Arrington’s spiritual experiences makes no mention of prophecy? This feels like a deliberately dishonest framing in order to reach the authors’ conclusion.
Another example of this sleight of hand occurs in the authors’ discussion of the miracle of the gulls. First the authors argue that the conflict is between traditional believers who believe that the Lord sent the gulls “in response to [the Saints’] faithful, fervent prayers,” and the “progressive historians” who claim “that the miraculous portion of the story is mere myth.” (92). As you can probably guess, this is not an accurate summary of what progressive historians claim (I think using “progressive” this way is reductive, but as in my previous review I do so here to match the authors’ usage). Instead, progressive historians point out that most contemporaneous sources do not mention the event. In fact, the authors recognize this because they cite an LDS Living article summarizing the historians’ argument and then summarize the argument as “Latter-day Saints and their descendants came to view these events [i.e., the arrival of the gulls] as a miracle.” (92). This is a *wildly* different claim than what the authors originally said the historians argued. Furthermore, in their framing of progressive vs. traditionalist, the authors take as the central progressive claim that “no one at the time recorded the [gulls’] arrival as a miracle.” (93). But that’s a specific claim made in a specific article (“Folk Ideas of Mormon Pioneers”) by specific authors (Jessie Embry and William Wilson), not one shared by every researcher, as can be seen by skimming the LDS Living article the authors reference, *which does not repeat this claim.* I think the authors present an arguable case that there was at least one contemporaneous account that at least suggested a miraculous origin for the gulls, and so arguably falsifying the very strong claim put forward by Embry and Wilson.‡ But that doesn’t mean that other, less categorical claims like the one in the LDS Living article are also incorrect. It seems that subsequent historical work (Embry and Wilson’s article is 25 years old now) has made the “progressive” historians aware of mistakes in their colleagues’ research, just as a community of scholars is supposed to function. Nor is it clear to me why the idea that the Saints came to view the arrival of the gulls as a miracle ought to be offensive or a betrayal of faith. There’s a famous discussion with Elder Bednar called Patterns of Light in which he says that sometimes recognizing the hand of God is like the sun rising on a foggy day. It has certainly been the case in my life recently that God’s guidance and influence has been far clearer in hindsight than it was in the moment. Why shouldn’t that be the case with the witnesses of the arrival of the gulls? In what way is that not faithful?
Additionally, there are some incredible assumptions made in the authors’ analysis of Henry Bigler’s diary entry, which they insist is a contemporary source of the arrival of the gulls. (98). The problem is that it simply is not. Bigler was not an eyewitness himself and the entry was not made until four months after the gulls’ arrival. What we have is a secondhand account of what happened, summarized by Bigler (i.e., he wasn’t conducting interviews and recording individuals’ thoughts) and filtered through him. He writes that “all looked upon the gulls as a God send, indeed all acknowledge the hand of the Lord was [in] it, that He had sent the white gulls by scores of thousands to save their crops.” (98). The authors claim without corroboration that “Bigler simply recorded what eyewitnesses undoubtedly communicated to him.” (99). But why is that undoubted? What evidence is there that this is a simple recording, a feat incredibly difficult in an era before audio recording technology? Similarly, the authors are emphatic that “all” means everyone, insisting that “all remaining pioneers believed the occurrence to be miraculous. Perhaps any non-believers—if indeed there were any—had emigrated to California.” (99). Again, what evidence is there that Bigler even talked to every single person, much less had a conversation with every single person about the arrival of the gulls? Far, far more likely is that this is a colloquial use of the word “all,” as when someone says, “All the spectators waited with bated breath” or “All the ward members fasted and prayed for relief.” This is not an actual claim that every single person was doing the thing in question! This is an analysis that imposes an unnatural definition of “all” in this context and postulates solutions with no evidence (“perhaps any non-believers . . . had emigrated to California”) because the conclusion has already been decided and is in fact constructing an analysis specifically to arrive at that conclusion.
Which is a good introduction to a critical problem with the authors’ analysis of sources that they use, namely that whether a source is useful and trustworthy depends entirely on whether the conclusions of that source serve the authors’ conclusions. “Every contemporary account accusing Joseph of a treasure digging career comes from an apostate member or anti-Mormon antagonist fixed on destroying the credibility of the Church,” and so they cannot be trusted. (114). Conveniently disregarded is that the vast majority of contemporary accounts claiming Joseph was a prophet, if not all of them, come from faithful members seeking to enhance the credibility of the Church. To my complete lack of surprise, the authors never bring that point up. With good reason, of course, because the bias of a source should not be, *is* not, dispositive of its truthfulness since every source will suffer from some form of bias. And we know that the authors are familiar with this problem of bias when writing history because they discuss it in the front matter of both volumes. Why, then, do the authors entirely dismiss critical accounts because of their bias? Because the conclusions of those critical accounts do not serve the authors’ conclusions.
You might argue that it’s not that complicated. Maybe the authors are simply dismissing any source critical of the Church. That this is not the case becomes immediately apparent when the authors reference John Dehlin and Jerald and Sandra Tanner, each prominent critics of the Church. The authors refer to Dehlin as someone “who keeps an attentive and rigorous pulse on trends within Mormonism” and proceed to quote him at length for multiple paragraphs. (188- 189). They then adopt his pejorative of “neo-apologetics” without any protest. (189). They also use his public musings on faith and politics in an LDS context, as well as the many anecdotes in comments on those musings, as evidence that what he says is correct. (280-281). The authors use the Tanners’ account of finding out who wrote a rebuttal to their book Mormonism: Shadow or Reality? extensively. (191-197). In none of these uses of Dehlin’s and the Tanners’ work do the authors raise the same concerns about bias or untrustworthiness because of the sources’ attitude toward the Restoration that they raise with accounts of Joseph’s treasure digging. Why? The only reasonable answer seems to be that the authors find the claims that Dehlin and the Tanners make useful in the authors’ attacks on “progressive” historians. Turns out it’s not actually about whether the source is “an apostate member or anti-Mormon antagonist fixed on destroying the credibility of the Church,” but rather whether the source furthers the authors’ conclusions or not, making for strange bedfellows indeed.
This same dismissal of sources that do not agree with the authors appears again in their treatment of Rough Stone Rolling. The authors argue that the book destroys faith and present several anecdotes in the form of podcast interviews and Amazon reviews. Not a single anecdote is presented in which Rough Stone Rolling strengthened faith, though podcast interviews and Amazon reviews also exist illustrating just that. I personally know a variety of people for whom that is the case. Granted, all of this is anecdotal, but it is revealing to see every single anecdote support the authors’ position. Sort of explains why anecdotes shouldn’t be the basis for an argument.
Finally, in terms of source treatment, is a quotation from Lucy Mack Smith’s history, in which she says, “I shall change my theme for the present, but let not my reader suppose that because I shall pursue another topic for a season that we stopt [sic] our labor and went at trying to win the faculty of Abrac drawing Magic circles or sooth saying to the neglect of all kinds of business we never during our lives suffered one important interest to swallow up every other obligation but whilst we worked with our hands we endeavored to remember the service of & the welfare of our souls.” (232). The authors insist that this is a categorical denial of the family’s involvement in folk magic, calling it a “denial of the accusations” (233) and saying that “her record is emphatically clear on the issue.” (235). Each time they do so, they quote again her statement, “[L]et not my reader suppose that . . . we stopt [sic] our labor and went at trying to win the faculty of Abrac drawing Magic circles or sooth saying.” Now, that is a categorical denial; but it’s not what she actually wrote. The original quotation, reproduced only at the beginning of the discussion, is “[L]et not my reader suppose that . . . we stopt [sic] our labor and went at trying to win the faculty of Abrac drawing Magic circles or sooth saying *to the neglect of all kinds of business.*” The full quotation suggests that the family was not involved in folk magic “to the neglect of all kinds of business,” refuting the rumors of the family’s indolence but also allowing that the family was in fact involved in folk magic to some extent, just not at the expense of their other work. The authors create a categorical denial from Smith by eliminating that qualification when they subsequently quote her. In other words, the categorical denial is not hers, but is made to seem so by the authors’ sleight of hand.
Lastly, I have to comment on some strange American history points the authors make. In discussing the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, the authors state, “[w]hile the protestors claimed entitlement to topple ‘racist’ monuments—targeting many Confederate statues—their fury also zeroed in on prominent Christian figures and heroes.” (285). Setting aside the scare quotes around “racist,” “Christian” and “racist” are not mutually exclusive categories. Indeed, much of American racism for most of its history involved biblical justifications, and the “Confederate statues” the authors mention were almost certainly all Christians! And some of the examples the authors provide of “prominent Christian figures and heroes” are George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom clearly held racist beliefs and acted in racist ways. Whether that merits toppling their statues is a debatable question, but the framing of the question here is disingenuous.
Which leads me to my final major concern: the authors’ reliance on David Barton. The authors completely dismiss the extensive work done on the relationship between Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings, particularly from Annette Gordon-Reed, based on Barton’s book The Jefferson Lies. (293 n.17). But Barton’s book, a bestseller from Christian publisher Thomas Nelson, had its publication and distribution terminated by the publisher because it found that “basic truths just were not there.” The senior vice president of the company said, “[A]s we got into [our investigations of historians’ concerns], our conclusion was that the criticisms were correct. There were historical details—matters of fact, not matters of opinion, that were not supported at all.” Reliance on David Barton is an absolutely massive warning sign that the authors are not dealing competently with this subject matter. Barton’s scholarly work is shoddy and routinely exposed as such by fellow evangelical Christian scholars, those who presumably ought to be the most sympathetic to his claims. The charge that Jefferson had an affair with Hemings has not only *not* been proven false, there is in fact strong evidence supporting its existence (see Gordon-Reed’s books Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy and The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family). Again the authors engage in their traditional sleight of hand, or perhaps are taken in by Barton’s in this case.
‡As you can probably tell from my hedging, I think the authors’ evidence isn’t nearly as strong as they do. They quote a letter from John Smith to Brigham Young in which Smith reports, “The seagulls have come in large flocks from the Lake and sweep the crickets as they go; it seems the hand of the Lord is in our favor.” (94). On the one hand, this is a contemporaneous record that mentions divine intervention. On the other hand, it strikes me as a tentative identification, and the authors’ use of it seems to beg the question at issue, i.e., equate the statement that “it seems the hand of the Lord is in our favor” with the identification of a miracle, when that’s the very question at issue. Though to be fair, it’s not clear to me by what criteria historians identify Orson Hyde’s statement in the 1853 general conference that “the gulls had been prepared by the hand of Providence” as the first reference to a miracle. All this to say that while I think Smith’s letter is arguably evidence, I don’t think it can be anything stronger than arguable.
For example, the authors write, “[Leonard] Arrington appears to have had no experience with the appearance of God, the appearance of angels, the gift of tongues, or inspired dreams, and his ‘testimony’ seems to have been rooted more in the intellect and possibly mystical experience, as opposed to spiritual manifestations.” (26-27). They then say, “In distinct contrast, when speaking directly with regard to the recounting of Latter-day Saint history, President [Ezra Taft] Benson explained that ‘No writer can ever accurately portray a prophet of God if he or she does not believe in prophecy.’” (27). Even accepting both these quotations as true for the sake of argument, how can they be considered “[i]n distinct contrast” when the summary of Arrington’s spiritual experiences makes no mention of prophecy? This feels like a deliberately dishonest framing in order to reach the authors’ conclusion.
Another example of this sleight of hand occurs in the authors’ discussion of the miracle of the gulls. First the authors argue that the conflict is between traditional believers who believe that the Lord sent the gulls “in response to [the Saints’] faithful, fervent prayers,” and the “progressive historians” who claim “that the miraculous portion of the story is mere myth.” (92). As you can probably guess, this is not an accurate summary of what progressive historians claim (I think using “progressive” this way is reductive, but as in my previous review I do so here to match the authors’ usage). Instead, progressive historians point out that most contemporaneous sources do not mention the event. In fact, the authors recognize this because they cite an LDS Living article summarizing the historians’ argument and then summarize the argument as “Latter-day Saints and their descendants came to view these events [i.e., the arrival of the gulls] as a miracle.” (92). This is a *wildly* different claim than what the authors originally said the historians argued. Furthermore, in their framing of progressive vs. traditionalist, the authors take as the central progressive claim that “no one at the time recorded the [gulls’] arrival as a miracle.” (93). But that’s a specific claim made in a specific article (“Folk Ideas of Mormon Pioneers”) by specific authors (Jessie Embry and William Wilson), not one shared by every researcher, as can be seen by skimming the LDS Living article the authors reference, *which does not repeat this claim.* I think the authors present an arguable case that there was at least one contemporaneous account that at least suggested a miraculous origin for the gulls, and so arguably falsifying the very strong claim put forward by Embry and Wilson.‡ But that doesn’t mean that other, less categorical claims like the one in the LDS Living article are also incorrect. It seems that subsequent historical work (Embry and Wilson’s article is 25 years old now) has made the “progressive” historians aware of mistakes in their colleagues’ research, just as a community of scholars is supposed to function. Nor is it clear to me why the idea that the Saints came to view the arrival of the gulls as a miracle ought to be offensive or a betrayal of faith. There’s a famous discussion with Elder Bednar called Patterns of Light in which he says that sometimes recognizing the hand of God is like the sun rising on a foggy day. It has certainly been the case in my life recently that God’s guidance and influence has been far clearer in hindsight than it was in the moment. Why shouldn’t that be the case with the witnesses of the arrival of the gulls? In what way is that not faithful?
Additionally, there are some incredible assumptions made in the authors’ analysis of Henry Bigler’s diary entry, which they insist is a contemporary source of the arrival of the gulls. (98). The problem is that it simply is not. Bigler was not an eyewitness himself and the entry was not made until four months after the gulls’ arrival. What we have is a secondhand account of what happened, summarized by Bigler (i.e., he wasn’t conducting interviews and recording individuals’ thoughts) and filtered through him. He writes that “all looked upon the gulls as a God send, indeed all acknowledge the hand of the Lord was [in] it, that He had sent the white gulls by scores of thousands to save their crops.” (98). The authors claim without corroboration that “Bigler simply recorded what eyewitnesses undoubtedly communicated to him.” (99). But why is that undoubted? What evidence is there that this is a simple recording, a feat incredibly difficult in an era before audio recording technology? Similarly, the authors are emphatic that “all” means everyone, insisting that “all remaining pioneers believed the occurrence to be miraculous. Perhaps any non-believers—if indeed there were any—had emigrated to California.” (99). Again, what evidence is there that Bigler even talked to every single person, much less had a conversation with every single person about the arrival of the gulls? Far, far more likely is that this is a colloquial use of the word “all,” as when someone says, “All the spectators waited with bated breath” or “All the ward members fasted and prayed for relief.” This is not an actual claim that every single person was doing the thing in question! This is an analysis that imposes an unnatural definition of “all” in this context and postulates solutions with no evidence (“perhaps any non-believers . . . had emigrated to California”) because the conclusion has already been decided and is in fact constructing an analysis specifically to arrive at that conclusion.
Which is a good introduction to a critical problem with the authors’ analysis of sources that they use, namely that whether a source is useful and trustworthy depends entirely on whether the conclusions of that source serve the authors’ conclusions. “Every contemporary account accusing Joseph of a treasure digging career comes from an apostate member or anti-Mormon antagonist fixed on destroying the credibility of the Church,” and so they cannot be trusted. (114). Conveniently disregarded is that the vast majority of contemporary accounts claiming Joseph was a prophet, if not all of them, come from faithful members seeking to enhance the credibility of the Church. To my complete lack of surprise, the authors never bring that point up. With good reason, of course, because the bias of a source should not be, *is* not, dispositive of its truthfulness since every source will suffer from some form of bias. And we know that the authors are familiar with this problem of bias when writing history because they discuss it in the front matter of both volumes. Why, then, do the authors entirely dismiss critical accounts because of their bias? Because the conclusions of those critical accounts do not serve the authors’ conclusions.
You might argue that it’s not that complicated. Maybe the authors are simply dismissing any source critical of the Church. That this is not the case becomes immediately apparent when the authors reference John Dehlin and Jerald and Sandra Tanner, each prominent critics of the Church. The authors refer to Dehlin as someone “who keeps an attentive and rigorous pulse on trends within Mormonism” and proceed to quote him at length for multiple paragraphs. (188- 189). They then adopt his pejorative of “neo-apologetics” without any protest. (189). They also use his public musings on faith and politics in an LDS context, as well as the many anecdotes in comments on those musings, as evidence that what he says is correct. (280-281). The authors use the Tanners’ account of finding out who wrote a rebuttal to their book Mormonism: Shadow or Reality? extensively. (191-197). In none of these uses of Dehlin’s and the Tanners’ work do the authors raise the same concerns about bias or untrustworthiness because of the sources’ attitude toward the Restoration that they raise with accounts of Joseph’s treasure digging. Why? The only reasonable answer seems to be that the authors find the claims that Dehlin and the Tanners make useful in the authors’ attacks on “progressive” historians. Turns out it’s not actually about whether the source is “an apostate member or anti-Mormon antagonist fixed on destroying the credibility of the Church,” but rather whether the source furthers the authors’ conclusions or not, making for strange bedfellows indeed.
This same dismissal of sources that do not agree with the authors appears again in their treatment of Rough Stone Rolling. The authors argue that the book destroys faith and present several anecdotes in the form of podcast interviews and Amazon reviews. Not a single anecdote is presented in which Rough Stone Rolling strengthened faith, though podcast interviews and Amazon reviews also exist illustrating just that. I personally know a variety of people for whom that is the case. Granted, all of this is anecdotal, but it is revealing to see every single anecdote support the authors’ position. Sort of explains why anecdotes shouldn’t be the basis for an argument.
Finally, in terms of source treatment, is a quotation from Lucy Mack Smith’s history, in which she says, “I shall change my theme for the present, but let not my reader suppose that because I shall pursue another topic for a season that we stopt [sic] our labor and went at trying to win the faculty of Abrac drawing Magic circles or sooth saying to the neglect of all kinds of business we never during our lives suffered one important interest to swallow up every other obligation but whilst we worked with our hands we endeavored to remember the service of & the welfare of our souls.” (232). The authors insist that this is a categorical denial of the family’s involvement in folk magic, calling it a “denial of the accusations” (233) and saying that “her record is emphatically clear on the issue.” (235). Each time they do so, they quote again her statement, “[L]et not my reader suppose that . . . we stopt [sic] our labor and went at trying to win the faculty of Abrac drawing Magic circles or sooth saying.” Now, that is a categorical denial; but it’s not what she actually wrote. The original quotation, reproduced only at the beginning of the discussion, is “[L]et not my reader suppose that . . . we stopt [sic] our labor and went at trying to win the faculty of Abrac drawing Magic circles or sooth saying *to the neglect of all kinds of business.*” The full quotation suggests that the family was not involved in folk magic “to the neglect of all kinds of business,” refuting the rumors of the family’s indolence but also allowing that the family was in fact involved in folk magic to some extent, just not at the expense of their other work. The authors create a categorical denial from Smith by eliminating that qualification when they subsequently quote her. In other words, the categorical denial is not hers, but is made to seem so by the authors’ sleight of hand.
Lastly, I have to comment on some strange American history points the authors make. In discussing the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, the authors state, “[w]hile the protestors claimed entitlement to topple ‘racist’ monuments—targeting many Confederate statues—their fury also zeroed in on prominent Christian figures and heroes.” (285). Setting aside the scare quotes around “racist,” “Christian” and “racist” are not mutually exclusive categories. Indeed, much of American racism for most of its history involved biblical justifications, and the “Confederate statues” the authors mention were almost certainly all Christians! And some of the examples the authors provide of “prominent Christian figures and heroes” are George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom clearly held racist beliefs and acted in racist ways. Whether that merits toppling their statues is a debatable question, but the framing of the question here is disingenuous.
Which leads me to my final major concern: the authors’ reliance on David Barton. The authors completely dismiss the extensive work done on the relationship between Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings, particularly from Annette Gordon-Reed, based on Barton’s book The Jefferson Lies. (293 n.17). But Barton’s book, a bestseller from Christian publisher Thomas Nelson, had its publication and distribution terminated by the publisher because it found that “basic truths just were not there.” The senior vice president of the company said, “[A]s we got into [our investigations of historians’ concerns], our conclusion was that the criticisms were correct. There were historical details—matters of fact, not matters of opinion, that were not supported at all.” Reliance on David Barton is an absolutely massive warning sign that the authors are not dealing competently with this subject matter. Barton’s scholarly work is shoddy and routinely exposed as such by fellow evangelical Christian scholars, those who presumably ought to be the most sympathetic to his claims. The charge that Jefferson had an affair with Hemings has not only *not* been proven false, there is in fact strong evidence supporting its existence (see Gordon-Reed’s books Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy and The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family). Again the authors engage in their traditional sleight of hand, or perhaps are taken in by Barton’s in this case.
‡As you can probably tell from my hedging, I think the authors’ evidence isn’t nearly as strong as they do. They quote a letter from John Smith to Brigham Young in which Smith reports, “The seagulls have come in large flocks from the Lake and sweep the crickets as they go; it seems the hand of the Lord is in our favor.” (94). On the one hand, this is a contemporaneous record that mentions divine intervention. On the other hand, it strikes me as a tentative identification, and the authors’ use of it seems to beg the question at issue, i.e., equate the statement that “it seems the hand of the Lord is in our favor” with the identification of a miracle, when that’s the very question at issue. Though to be fair, it’s not clear to me by what criteria historians identify Orson Hyde’s statement in the 1853 general conference that “the gulls had been prepared by the hand of Providence” as the first reference to a miracle. All this to say that while I think Smith’s letter is arguably evidence, I don’t think it can be anything stronger than arguable.
December 20, 2021
Beginning in the forward and consistently throughout the book, the authors express their disdain for they way modern professional historians (including those officially employed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) have described Mormon history. The quality of this book is pretty consistent with that approach. More than anything, this book is an an attack on those that the authors perceive as threats to traditional Mormonism. It was interesting to see the way they engage with some of the modern issues in Mormonism, but I don't find them very credible.
March 21, 2023
outstanding defense of Joseph Smith
Excellent scholarly research. Clear historical evidence of biased agendas. Debunks Rough Stone Rolling, and restores the good name of Joseph Smith prophet of the Restoration!
Excellent scholarly research. Clear historical evidence of biased agendas. Debunks Rough Stone Rolling, and restores the good name of Joseph Smith prophet of the Restoration!
January 14, 2025
Fascinating and well documented. Provides the reader much to think about.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews