People named Peggy Fletcher. Peggy Fletcher. During Sunday school, a man approached him and said, The bishop would like to talk to you. Quinn dreaded what was coming. Religion Two decades after she was "exed," Utah writer still attends her LDS ward. The day before, a similar bomb had killed Steve Christensen, a friend and Mormon history enthusiast who had arranged for Quinn to speak at lunch and dinner engagements, paying him with generous gift cards to his fathers clothing store. They didn't say anything. At least, that's how Hall sees it. Unresolved: Release in which this issue/RFE will be addressed. . ", Hanks' rebaptism suggests a difference in LDS leadership from then to now, said Dan Wotherspoon, Sunstone's editor from 2001 to 2008. They dont acquire these positions by filling out an application and sending in a rsum.
Peggy Fletcher Stack | The Christian Century (Benson died in 94, Hunter in 95.) We had stake [regional] conference in September. Whitesides says that Connie Chungs people asked her to take a hidden camera into her court. By then an assistant district attorney, Lambert later helped prosecute the case against Hofmann. Quinn was convinced, in any case, that his fate in any disciplinary council was predetermined, that Boyd K. Packer wanted him out of the church and Hanks was going to make it happen. Peggy Fletcher Stack Senior religion reporter. On Friday , during a popular evening session of next week's Sunstone Symposium, an annual meeting for Mormon intellectuals and observers, Hanks will detail her 20-year spiritual sojourn as a feminist theologian and chaplain, which brought her full circle back into Mormonism. I heard she's not Mormon at all. Hi, Peggy. Taking the sacrament because it's an exclusion I feel every single week. This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2012, and information in the article may be outdated. Excommunication opened the door to a larger cosmos, inside and outside myself.". [Excommunicated Mormons are not supposed to take communion.] I always felt that I had Gods sanction and encouragement, so I went ahead following that path. Even early on, a fellow Mormon historian started telling Quinn he must have a death wish regarding his membership in the church. The president in 2012, when Hanks was readmitted, was Thomas S. Monson. The biggest thing that got me was the excommunication of bill reel segment of the Mormon stories podcast. In both forms of LDS courts, the accused is typically allowed to bring in character witnesses. Then I went away to my cabin for the summer and he called all the temples in Utah, saying he was canceling my recommend. When the men from the stake presidency came to his door in February, Quinn was living three blocks from the Salt Lake Temple and the worldwide headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Peggy Fletcher Stack is an American journalist, editor, and author. Kate Kelly, founder of the Ordain Women movement, was excommunicated in 2014 for her views on gender inequality in the Mormon Church . Ultimately, the events of September 1993 may have helped broaden those borderlands, encouraging other members of the faith to openly question Mormon orthodoxy without entirely leaving the religion behind. Saturday, February 22, 1997. Excommunication is a complicated and multi-layered process for sexual minorities in the church who choose to marry in a way that the church considers a "same sex" marriage. By Chris Jorgensen and Peggy Fletcher Stack The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is purging hundreds of Mormon dissidents who church officials say are preoccupied unduly with Armageddon. Did the Utah Legislature do enough to save the Great Salt Lake?
It's Judgment Day for Far Right: LDS Church Purges Survivalists On Oct. 16, 1985, Quinn was having a late lunch at a BYU food court when he heard a news report that Mark Hofmann had been blown up by a pipe bomb in Salt Lake City. The men at his door were the local stake president and his two counselors, the men responsible for overseeing all the congregations in the area. She talks very vaguely when it comes to personal, specific spiritual beliefs and whether they align with doctrine, but she doesn't hesitate to call the church out on its shit at all. Peggy Fletcher Stack, The Salt Lake Tribune, 24 Nov. 2022 To that end, the power that Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger bring is their personal stories of defiance and excommunication. Quinn was so depressed by the experience that for a few weeks he lost his belief in God completely. I did.
Unto Dust Shalt Thou Return | Out of Obscurity Peggy Fletcher Stack - WikiMili, The Best Wikipedia Reader I see her articles on here all the time and the Tribune has never really been a friend to the TSCC. He was excommunicated by the LDS Church in 2013 for refusing to cease publication of his 2011 book, Passing the Heavenly Gift which challenges many points of LDS orthodoxy. He acknowledged to me that, of course, it is possible to find outlets for service outside of Mormonism. McMurrin Differed in Gentler Times. I love the church. In 1981, Quinn was asked by the colleges chapter of Phi Alpha Theta, a national honor society for history students, to respond to The Mantle Is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect. He did not pull his punches. Taylor fled to Canada during the congressional hearings for Reed Smoot, a fellowbut monogamousapostle, who had been elected to the U.S. Senate. The truth is not uplifting. Thats according to Quinnmy request to speak with Packer, whose health has badly deteriorated in recent years, was declined.
. Local TV reporters were filming the session, and the AP reporter Vern Anderson was sitting at the far side of the room about halfway back. 9:30AM EDT 8/29/2017 Peggy Fletcher Stack/RNS. We embedded him as thoroughly in the church as we ourselves had been. By Peggy Fletcher Stack. A candlelight vigil was held outside the Salt Lake City meetinghouse where it took place. Nowadays, anyone can Google Mormon polygamy and learn more than theyd ever need to know about that practice, about its abandonment, the subsequent fallout, and so on. The regional council forwarded her request to church headquarters, with the recommendation that she be approved for rebaptism. I felt they were not going to drive me away. Mormon author Grant H. Palmer has been summoned to an LDS Church disciplinary hearing on Sunday, facing possible excommunication for apostasy. During Quinns New Orleans years, the First Presidency put out a statement discouraging Mormons from participating in academic conferences and other independent forums devoted to the discussion of their faith. Excommunication has played a significant role throughout the churchs history. If Peggy wanted to do some groundbreaking . I might have lost my soul, but at least I still have my mind. Michael Quinns final disciplinary council was held on Sept. 26, 1993, in the Salt Lake Stake Center, the headquarters for the oldest stake in Utah, founded by Brigham Young in 1847. In the summer of 1952, the late Sterling McMurrin, an eminent philosopher and writer, met with two LDS apostles to defend his theological views.With complete candor, McMurrin laid out for Elders Joseph Fielding Smith and Harold . My searching was complete. The high council also heard from Andersons son, Christian, who offered his personal assessment. BYU and Utah State both wanted to hire him. Most people don't know I've been excommunicated. The institutional churchs position toward its intellectual community has shifted slowly and subtly but in real ways in the past 30 years; it is possible that there is a worry that allowing for her rebaptism would unearth battles the present First Presidency would like to let lie buried and spur a public relitigation of the issue., Secondly, the controversies surrounding Anderson had a great deal to do with feminism in the church and with ecclesiastical dissent, he said. Hired in 1991 to cover Utah's various faiths, particularly Mormonism, Peggy has talked forgiveness with Archbishop Desmond Tutu . All rights reserved. Hed read the essay about women and the priesthood, and he asked Quinn to speak on the subject at an upcoming fireside, an informal evening meeting often held at Mormon meetinghouses. Two decades ago, Maxine Hanks could not have imagined where her spiritual journey would take her, but she knew this much: She would not likely be walking into the waters of Mormon baptism. For the faithful, the simplest narrative regarding LDS polygamy is that God wanted Mormons to practice it between 1843when He revealed the doctrine of plural marriage to Joseph Smithand 1890, when He informed one of Smiths successors, Wilford Woodruff, of a change in course. A second bomb that first day killed Kathy Sheets, the wife of one of Christensens former business partners. After the Newsweek article ran, Quinn got a phone call from Marion D. Hanks. We had a family devotional every night with prayer, singing and scripture reading. sltrib.com 1996-2023 The Salt Lake Tribune. He looked in the card catalog under pervert, which was the word his grandmother had used after he told her that another kid at church had been groping him. Photo by George Frey/Bloomberg via Getty Images. Peggy Fletcher. [Husband] Paul, Christian [their son] and I sang in the choir that day. He then expressed his gratitude to the church for providing, throughout his life, a vehicle for service. Since I'm there every Sunday, I don't fit their model of an excommunicated member.
Stack has received and been nominated for multiple awards. By Peggy Fletcher Stack The Salt Lake Tribune. There was no process for voluntary withdrawal from the Mormon Church in the 1960s, so each of these kids had to be excommunicatedtechnically, for apostasy. What do you think about these potential actions against Kate Kelly and John Dehlin? By Peggy Fletcher Stack The Salt Lake Tribune. But that was not how he experienced it. [5][7][8] From 1978 to 1986, she was the third editor of Sunstone. He compared Packers treatment of Church leaders to the Roman Catholic doctrine of papal infallibility, which is anathema to Mormons. Hanks became less diplomatic. The intellectual climate had improved under Oaks, people said. It was really important to Paul and me that Christian grow up in a religious community, and the church was the one we chose. At least, that's how Hall sees it. . For the next year and a half, Quinn spent hours every week in the archives, taking detailed notes on diaries that belonged to 19th-century Mormon leaders, among other documents. . Two of the so-called "September Six" have found their way back into the LDS fold while Anderson though never rebaptized in some ways has never left. Vacillating Wildly From Dispiriting to Exhilarating, the worldwide effort to bring salvation to all of Gods children, Some things that are true are not very useful, LDS Authority and New Plural Marriages, 18901904, this growing conflict between leaders and intellectuals, Mormon Women Have Had the Priesthood Since 1843, Quinns paper about the Baseball Baptism Program, the responsibility to preserve the doctrinal purity of the church, critical pieces he had written about Mitt Romney, Hanks described her path back to Mormonism, the administration caved to pressure from Ira Fulton. While the simpler approach is handled by a bishop and his two counselors, the more elaborate version is run by a stake president, and it involves not only his two counselors but the stakes high council, a group of 12 men. Where a skeptic sees convenience, a believer may see Gods hand. While Packers precise involvement remains a matter of dispute, what little is known hints at his interference. "Nobody asked me to disavow my book or stop writing," Hanks said. Mormon higher-ups hold keys to excommunication process against two activists. Woodruff himself said in his journal that he was acting for the temporal salvation of the church, and the 1890 Manifestoas his official statement is knownwas not immediately taken to be a divine revelation. LDS officials disciplined Anderson and five other Mormon intellectuals in and around the fall of 1993. Hankswhose nephew Paul would show up on Quinns doorstep in 1993was himself a general authority, and he had overseen the two-year Mormon mission Quinn served in England after his freshman year at BYU. Instead, he simply took away Quinns temple recommend. Temples, distinct from regular meetinghouses, are reserved for sacred rituals, and require a recommend, a small card indicating ones worthiness, to enter. More painfully, as a high councilor in a Utah stake several years later, Quinn was part of courts prompted by personal sinsuch as engaging in homosexual acts. When Hanks showed up on Quinns doorstep in Salt Lake City that February, he brought a letter citing two of Quinns articles and a statement Quinn made to a reporter in 1991 as evidence that he was an apostate. Ive had more than one therapist Ive talked to about this issue say, Dont you see that you were purposely setting yourself up for this fall? he told me. Or a great one, if possible: Since childhood, Quinn had been told by his grandmother that someday he would be an apostle of the church. He then announced that I was not a member in good standing and could not use my temple recommend. Now I see that he just didn't appreciate the dishonesty associated with his grandpa. By Peggy Fletcher Stack. He didn't seem to know what footnotes are so he thought I made the whole thing up. "But when I got to the point of priestly ordination, I pulled back. While serving it in England, he was tasked with cleaning up the results of the Baseball Baptism Program, in which missionaries used sports to attract young converts. We were sitting in the front room of a house owned by a gay couple he knows in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Salt Lake City. Some did not know that they were. I prayed every article I wrote into print, he said, continually asking God what he should do.
Former Mormon leader is building a new life -- as a woman - Rick Alan Ross "Given who I was, there was no place to go but out," Hanks said in 2003, on the 10th anniversary of the excommunications. Something similar, if more protracted, took place after September 1993. My strong hunch is that she is a cultural Mormon who no longer believes, pays tithing or observes the WoW, and that she's loosey-goosey with her attendance. The fact that we keep going to church is a blessing. But gradually, pressure on Mormon scholars eased, and today many write and publish without any obvious concern for what their stake presidents might think. When Benson asked why no one had stopped him, Oaks allegedly replied, You cant stage manage a grizzly bear. Benson resigned his Mormon membership shortly afterward and became a vocal opponent of the church his grandfather ostensibly led. ", Kelly writes in London's Guardian newspaper "For me it is because of my faith and not in spite of it that I have a desire to stand up for myself and my sisters. A year later, David J. McLean, president of the Salt Lake Liberty Stake, reconvened a high council, a body that had excommunicated her 25 years and six months earlier for apostasy, Anderson wrote in a summary of her experience for a forthcoming volume of her essays, Mercy Without End: Toward a More Inclusive Church.. Kelly was excommunicated from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in June. sltrib.com. It was a long time coming: Quinn had known he was gay since he was 12 years old. Quinns mother, on the other hand, was a sixth-generation Mormon: She had an ancestor who converted when the Mormons were still in Nauvoo, Ill., and who is mentioned in Joseph Smiths journals. The LDS church does not remove any name from the list unless the person is excommunicated, asks to be removed or is dead. I wrote an article for "Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought" that summarized 133 cases of LDS ecclesiastical abuse, and my pleas to do better to care for the Mormon faithful. He never wrote another work of fiction. He rejected the idea that his writings and his comments to reporters about Mormon history warranted disciplinary action, and he had come to a kind of peace about what he was sure awaited him. Why didn't you go to the hearing to defend yourself? Hanks officially came back into the fold in 2012. Lavina Fielding Anderson, who was excommunicated in 1993 as part of the so-called September Six, has had her request for rebaptism into the LDS Church rejected by the faith's governing First Presidency after being approved by her local lay leaders. "She might be a model for others who have been missing their Mormon community.". I was not surprised or angry about the outcome, Anderson said Wednesday, and she has no plans to try to open that door again. The entry for perversion said See homosexuality, and he read all the available books in that categorynot a lot in a small public library in 1956, though fairly heady stuff for a 12-year-old: Kinseys Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, some Freud, some Havelock Ellis. Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts. The bishops next comment was, Whats wrong with those people up in Salt Lake? He was thrilled to have Quinn in his ward. He was housesitting. If those top leaders did not know where he lived, then they could not assign him to a particular stake, and his church membership could not be threatened. The book opened Quinns teenage eyes to dissent within the highest echelons of LDS leadership, and to the apostles debateand apparent dissemblingabout plural marriage after 1890. (He was delivering the third bombto whom it is not entirely clearwhen it blew up accidentally.) Hanks worked for the Church Educational System, where Packer had long been an administrator, and Quinn heard that Loren C. Dunn, a friend of Packers and fellow general authority, had spoken to Hanks personally. I don't think I could have done that graciously.
High-Ranking Mormon Official, is Excommunicated - Coercion Code Truth is, she has never stopped attending her Mormon ward. See Photos. These dangers, Packer said, were the relatively new feminist and gay-lesbian movements, and the ever-present challenge from the so-called scholars or intellectuals.. http://www.sunstonemagazine.com/symposium. She has been visited by all her ward and stake leaders since 1993, she said, but this was the first time anyone had ever proposed it. Men only become gay in prison, or sometimes in the Navy. The Salt Lake Tribune/June 16, 2014. Bad marriages had women running to and away from . I had my answers.". I was removed from that situation. The church declined to comment on the decision. Since then, only one Avraham Gileadi, an Old Testament scholar who has spent his life researching and . It sent him down a rabbit hole. However, I do not see that eternal equality reflected in the contemporary church.". There he told a story about the time Packer embarrassed him in front of fellow church leaders as apparent payback for a slight from six years before. Knowing her personally (not closely, but we're acquainted) I get the feeling that she is much more culturally LDS than actually LDS. Since then, only one Avraham Gileadi, an Old Testament scholar who has spent his life researching and writing about the biblical oracle Isaiah's prophecies about our time has been rebaptized into the faith. By Peggy Fletcher Stack and David Noyce Sep. 7, 2022 What this sociologist (Darron Smith) and Peggy Fletcher Stack fail to recognize is that Mormon racism isn't in the past, it's in the present. In May 1993, apostle Boyd K. Packer said the church's three greatest threats came from feminists, gays and intellectuals.
Writer excommunicated during 'September Six' purge loses her bid to Packers notion that those writing church history should share only those things that are faith-promoting is not just intellectually offensive nowit has become quaint, the relic of a time when information was not so freely available.
It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted. News. That last comment became the caption for a Newsweek photo three months later, when the magazines religion reporter, Kenneth L. Woodward, wrote a 1,000-word story about Quinns talk and the controversy it prompted. [5] They moved to Utah in 1991 when she was hired to be the religion writer for The Salt Lake Tribune, where much of her reporting has focused on the LDS Church. The temple president tried to make it as good an experience as he could for my parents, Paul, Christian and Marina [his bride] and me. But it was a forgery.
Nobody Knows Religion Quite Like Peggy Fletcher Stack Peggy fletcher stack excommunicated Denver Snufferpersonalbordenver Carlos Snuffer Jr.Religion (Mormon Independent) Restoration Andsupra-Denominational Christian [1] Nationality Americanhome Townmountain House, Idahochildrensisx Daughters and Two Children [2] Alma Materdaniel Webster Junior Collegemcmurry UniversityBrigham Young University (JD, 1980) Later he was told that despite his request that no one speak for him, a friend had attended and done just that, playing recordings of Quinns presentations at past Sunstone Symposia and reading excerpts from his writings. "It will be a chance for a larger audience to hear this story," she said, and to hear how people can wrestle with their faith and then live it out. During the hiring process, a college dean offered to protect him, Quinn says, from those peoplethe LDS leadersup in Salt Lake., Before he could be hired, though, he had to visit LDS headquarters at 47 East South Temple in downtown Salt Lake and sit for an interview with one of those peoplespecifically, a general authority, one of the 100 or so men who run the church. It was held by the stake high council, and so my bishop and ward members took the position that that was their doing. She was the editor of Hastings Center Report from 1986 until 1991, when she was hired to start the "Faith" column in the Salt Lake Tribune. I did the very best I knew how to do, the thing that I felt was the right thing to do., Donate to the newsroom now. Hofmann eventually became, in the words of one expert, the most skilled forger this country has ever seen. For LDS leaders nervous about church history, he was a nightmare personified: a lying, murderous man hell-bent on embarrassing the religion while glorifying and enriching himself. Quinn had been avoiding this confrontation for nearly five years. The noisy nonsense on-screen felt to Quinn like a rough equivalent of what the church was doing to him. One theory on that first day of panic was that the bombings were connected with the business, an investment company called CFS. Quinn had spent three years in the military in the late 60s, working in counterintelligence. Create an account to follow your favorite communities and start taking part in conversations. It took several hoursa vigil was held outside for the first few, with candles and hymns and hot chocolate. Daryl Peveto/Luceo Images for Slate. (There is no conclusive evidence it took place, Quinn writes, but he does not dismiss the idea of one outright.) One of the articles came from an anthology called Women and Authority: Re-Emerging Mormon Feminism, edited by Maxine Hanks, a distant relative of Pauland his uncle Marionand, soon, one of the September Six herself. He moved back to Utah and began receiving mail at his actual address. The stake president said I was "exed" for apostasy but I didn't really fit the handbook definition. In 2004, after a series of fellowships and visiting appointments, he was the only finalist for a tenured position at the University of Utah. The same month that his essay about post-Manifesto polygamy was published, in April 1985, Quinn and his wife separated. I hate him. Maxine Hanks was held in the same stake center one week before, though she did not attend it. In 1981, he gave an address to church educators called The Mantle Is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect, which was organized around four cautions. The second of them is this: There is a temptation for the writer or teacher of church history to want to tell everything, whether it is worthy or faith-promoting or not. Especially considering that in a lot of cases she's the one doing the exposing My guess is she's a let's-reform-this-baby-from-within progressive.
'Mormon Land': A scholar who was excommunicated for his - MSN The Salt Lake Tribune . The symposium's "Pillars of My Faith" session will showcase a similar path, said Mary Ellen Robertson, Sunstone's interim executive director. Snuffer was excommunicated. by Peggy Fletcher Stack. Mike Quinn in his Rancho Cucamonga home in California this summer. Elder Packer, he told Quinn, will never get over this.. Paul Toscanos sister-in-law was excommunicated for her writings about the Heavenly Mother, a controversial aspect of Mormon theology. It was, Quinn told me, an awful, awful year., When he had recovered enough to write, Quinn finished the sequel to The Mormon Hierarchy and revised Early Mormonism and the Magic Worldview. Paul's mother was great. I know how to avoid people I didnt want to be in contact with, he says.