The Mormon History Wars

Boyd K. Packer, Clark Gilbert, and the mistake we're about to make again

illustration courtesy of Beck Seamons

History does not repeat, but it does instruct.

– Timothy Snyder

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Last month, the historian Ben Park suggested in the Salt Lake Tribune that a golden age in Mormon studies is drawing to a close. According to Park, ecclesiastical tolerance of academic study of Mormonism is giving way to skepticism and renewed boundary maintenance; contra the openness of the past fifteen years, now only some Mormon histories are deemed worth sharing.

Park’s historiographical sketch is troubling, and it calls to mind an earlier period of retrenchment, one that I studied closely last summer while working as a research fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship.

As Park mentions in his commentary, the 1970s were pivotal yet controversial years in Mormon historiography. On the one hand, the institutional church invited Leonard Arrington and his team of faithful, professional historians into the Church History Department, and his Church History Division produced a stream of impressive books and articles that were both rigorous and faith-affirming. On the other hand, apostles Boyd K. Packer and Ezra Taft Benson led a successful campaign to dissolve the Church History Division, temporarily ending the church’s experiment with telling warts-and-all history.

What came next—which was the subject of my research—is instructive, as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints now finds itself at a similar crossroads. 

In August 1981, Elder Packer delivered a confrontational address to CES teachers, one that was clearly intended to reach Mormon historians across the board. “In this church,” Packer instructed, “we are not neutral. We are one-sided. There is a war going on and we are engaged in it. It is the war between good and evil and we are belligerents defending the good.” 

The speech was remarkable not only for what Packer said, but also for the way in which he said it. This was not a respectful and even-handed intervention in an academic debate about historical methodology; rather, it was an authoritative pronouncement from a leader to his subordinates. Packer warned historians that if they were not sufficiently loyal to the church, they risked placing themselves in “spiritual jeopardy,” and he closed with an appeal to “those who may have lost [their] way,” urging them to “come back!”

Packer’s remarks elicited a series of indignant responses from Latter-day Saint historians, many of them frustrated at the implication that they were dissidents. (Most of the letters quoted below are held in the University of Utah’s special collections.)

James Clayton, a history professor at the University of Utah, took issue with Packer’s dualistic framing, arguing in a letter to Packer that “historians cannot be divided into those who fight for God and those who battle for the Devil.” He added that “taking a one-sided, faith-promoting approach to our history is basically as limiting as taking a one-sided, faith-destroying approach to our history.” In other words, well-meaning efforts to erase errors from the Mormon past could result in work that was just as empty as explicitly anti-Mormon polemics. 

L. Jackson Newell, one of Clayton’s colleagues at the University of Utah, agreed, telling Packer that “our young people are served better by teachers who help them reckon with the real nature of our history—imperfect, but inspired—rather than by well-meaning instructors who would shield them from certain information or protect them from differing views.”

Stanley Kimball, a Latter-day Saint historian living in Illinois, also typed out a letter to Packer. He characterized Packer’s address as “another most serious blow to some of the most faithful and dedicated men and women in the Church,” and he suggested that attacking historians was counterproductive, as “professional historians of Church history form the Church’s first line of defense concerning our past.”

Beleaguered Church Historian Leonard Arrington, still reeling from the dissolution of his Church History Division, worried about the impact of Packer’s speech. In a letter, he warned Gordon B. Hinckley, a recent addition to the First Presidency, that “the effect [of the speech] has been to isolate intellectually some of our fine LDS people from their Church leaders.”

Arrington was right to be worried. The next twelve years would witness an escalation of hostilities between church leaders and Latter-day Saint scholars that would culminate in the September Six excommunications—many of them likely orchestrated by Boyd K. Packer. Those relatively high-profile excommunications were preceded by a series of smaller skirmishes, including an anti-intellectual inquisition orchestrated by conservative apostle Mark Petersen and the shuttering of Seventh East Press, an independent student newspaper at BYU that had sprung up in the wake of Packer’s 1981 address. By 1993, the alleged instances of “ecclesiastical abuse” towards Latter-day Saint scholars were so numerous that Lavina Fielding Anderson could publish a fifty-eight-page indictment in the pages of Dialogue. (She was subsequently excommunicated.)

Which brings us back to 2025. Just as in the early 1980s, a period of retrenchment is taking shape, complete with a controversial apostolic warning (Elder Holland’s “musket fire” address in 2021), a polarizing church leader (CES commissioner Clark Gilbert), and faithful scholars who feel as though they are being vilified. The comparison is not perfect, and history does not repeat itself, but it nevertheless seems possible that tensions could continue to escalate just as they did forty years ago.

But we shouldn’t want that. As a result of its heavy-handed gatekeeping in the 1980s, the church alienated a generation of intellectuals, garnered negative publicity, and fought a losing battle against historical openness. Thanks to the internet, members learned of unpleasant episodes in Mormon history despite the church’s efforts, and some members’ sense that the church had purposefully misled them only made matters worse.

Tragically, the figures who were poised to smooth the transition from hagiography to credible history were the very ones driven from the church. Faithful scholars, who had one foot in the academy and another in the ward meetinghouse, were eager to do the work of introducing complexity without sacrificing belief, but some leaders made them feel as if that work was harmful.

We—church leaders and lay members alike—would be wise to recall this history, as doing so might prevent us from once again making scapegoats out of those who, to quote Spencer Fluhman, are constructing “a bridge between one church-world and another forming in the lives of [the next generation].”

We ought to applaud, not berate, those bridge builders.